Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Manifest Mammals: In Pursuit Of Sri Lanka’s Jackals, Hares, Porcupines, Pangolins & Otters
Forget elephants and even leopards. What are the five great mammals of Sri Lanka that most people overlook to their eternal cost?
The most discerning of mammal spotters in Sri Lanka pursue neither elephants, monkeys, nor leopards. Instead, they seek encounters with those five mammals that live in plain sight almost everywhere – the ones that can be spotted from a tuk tuk, a veranda, a city park, or a riverbank. Free of drama, subterfuge, or infuriating modesty, all five can be added daily – indeed, repeatedly – to that invisible and life-affirming tally that tips life just a little further away from the claustrophobic norms of humankind.
The first and most common of these creatures is the porcupine, known to the consternation of proto nationalists as the Indian Crested Porcupine. It is found right across Sri Lanka and India.
Nikita Khrushchev, the bombastic Russian leader, was unexpectedly wise to the beast, stating to his enemies that “if you start throwing hedgehogs at me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you.“ Up to three feet long and sixteen kilos in weight, they are, like Khrushchev, highly territorial.
When they feel threatened, or their territory is unacceptably encroached upon, their sharp quills will spring up, and they will go on the attack. Nocturnal and usually hidden in the burrows that are their homes, they are eager consumers of bark, fruit, berries, vegetables and almost all plants in gardens and plantations. Gratifyingly monogamous, their pregnancies last eight months, and the two to four cubs born live with the parents until they are two or three years old.
Fossilised records from thousands of years ago show that the present porcupine once had an ancestor similar to, though smaller than, its current form: Hystrix Sivalensis Sinhaleyus. No linguist has yet come forward to show whether or not this antique version of today’s porcupine would have been able to talk to its modern heir. But it is more than likely, not least because the language of porcupines is far removed from the vagaries that force most human languages to bend, evolve, or corrupt.
Even when alone, porcupines are astonishingly chatty and keep themselves entertained with a wide range of grunts, whines, moans, snorts, and murmurs. Interporcupine communication occurs more naturally during the mating season, a time joyfully characterised by shattering shrieks and screams. Wailing and a clattering of teeth are a racket saved for predators. For one-on-one interporcupine fights – more common when two males are in ardent courtship of a single female, they will add to their usual litany of noises a deafening set of howls and screams.
Pangolins, however, the second of the island’s mammal species, or scaly anteaters as they are also called, have an almost wholly different array of sounds that they use to get through their day. Of the many blessings given to them by the good lord, sight, sadly, was not one of them. Their tiny eyes are covered by the thickest of eyelids - a sort of anti-termite defence – and their vision is poor to myopic. It seems that as the animal became ever more nocturnal, its eyesight decreased accordingly, proving once again that evolution, unlike one’s bank account, can always keep up with events.
It is sound and smell, therefore, that give the beast all the guiding lights it needs to flourish. Their hearing is acute, and their noses, bristling with the most powerful of scent sensors, sit at the end of exceptionally long snouts. They can find their way into ant or termite nests, however far underground, eyes closed. Given that their sticky tongues can stretch for almost 28 inches, the blighted insects have little option but to surrender themselves gracefully as supper – some 70 million a year per pangolin, on the count of one exhausted scientist.
On the auditory front, the pangolin repertoire of sound is all hisses, whimpers, snuffles, and sniffs – a breathier orchestration when compared to porcupines. If disturbed, they hiss and chuff in deep breaths. Snorting is often used in place of hello to a fellow pangolin, and happy, contented grunts accompany their dining.
Pangopups whimper to communicate with their mothers. However, no one has yet deciphered the sheer variety of whimpers recorded to determine which whimper is slated for which kind of inter-family statement. Pregnancies last around two months, and the pangopup (for there is usually only one) gets carried on its mother’s tail until it can move around confidently.
Pangolins reserve their most arresting sound for when they are most really alarmed. Curling into a ball, they rub their hard scales together to produce a unique jungle-maraca sound. This is often accompanied by the ejection of an exceptionally noxious, acid-smelling liquid distilled in glands near their anus. It is hard to clean off, the obvious lesson being never to shock a pangolin, especially before a date.
But of course, the most immediately exciting thing about spotting a pangolin is not its smell or sound – but its looks. Clothed in dexterous overlapping and generously rounded scales, they are a unique cross between an architectural marvel, a desert tank, and a Viking warrior clad in chain mail.
Measuring some fixed feet nose to tail, pangolins make their home in burrows in rainforest and grassland and even modest hill country - right across the Indian subcontinent and all across Sri Lanka. Even so, they may soon drop off the Manifest Mammals list as they have become increasingly threatened, not only by habitat loss affecting almost all animals on the island but also by illegal poaching. Its meat is considered a luxurious bush meat to satisfy the jaded appetites of decadent diners. And its scales are prized in Chinese and traditional medicines for all manner of disorders for which there is not a single shred of supporting or validating evidence. Their skins are routinely butchered into rings, charms or crafted into grisly leather goods, like boots and shoes that shame their wearers more than they might be if caught dancing naked down Galle Face Green on the top of a big red bus.
Such predatory and pointless threats are more understandably avoided by the third of the island’s manifest mammals – the jackal, with whom the word cherish has yet to find much of a home. “It is far better,” wrote Tipu Sultan, shortly before being killed by the future Duke of Wellington in Srirangapatna in 1799, “to live like a lion for a day than to live like a jackal for a hundred years”.
The Sultan, who, of course, saw himself as the lion, was merely channelling the unrelentingly poor press that jackals have endured since recorded time - in Arabic holy writ, the Bible; even in Buddhist Pali literature, which depicts them as inferior, greedy, cunning creatures.
Despite accruing the sort of headlines beloved of the Daily Mail, the Sri Lankan Jackal is second only to the Leopard in the pecking order of island predators. And Sri Lankan it is, to its very paws, for the Sri Lankan jackal differs from its Indian cousin, the South Indian Golden Jackal, by virtue of its marginally greater size, the rooted lobe on the inner side of the third upper premolar (a peculiarity to capture the attention of the more discerning spotters) and a darker, less shaggy coat all round.
It is a skilled hunter, and, like a wolf, a pack animal that will eat anything from rodents, birds, and mice to young gazelles, reptiles, and even fruit. It is also an admirable scavenger, good at tidying up any suppurating bit of animate mess that needs attention. Although found in both wet and dry zones across the island, it may soon fall off the Manifest Mammals list if more care is not taken to protect its habitat. Its numbers have more than halved in two decades, a rate of attrition worsened by rabies and roadkill.
Less threatened - though with a similar habitat range - is the island’s fourth mammal. Curiously, Sri Lanka lacks rabbits, though it does have a hare. Just the one. And an endemic one too, a distinct variant of the Indian Hare. The Ceylon Black-Naped Hare is a mere fifty centimetres head to body and distinguished by having a black patch on the back of its neck. It is also notable for its dozy daytime habit – being more of a night creature, leaving the day to sleep alone in the grassland, its preferred habitat. Blessed with excellent sight, hearing, and smell, it can usually outrun any would-be enemy and remains happily widespread across the island, a condition not unrelated to its eagerness to breed at almost any time, anywhere, anyhow, throwing off litters of up to four leverets a go. Almost uniquely amongst Sri Lanka’s mammals, they are tight-tipped, happiest when silent, though they tend to grind their teeth when especially contented.
Would that such contentment stalk the last of the island’s manifest mammals – the Ceylon Otter. “What is this life, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare,” wrote Henry Williamson, the man who put otters firmly on the literary map with “Tarka the Otter.”
But care is what Ottars now so badly need. Around the world, otters face the very real threat of extinction; their potential demise remains a calamity that is still being addressed with only modest corrective steps. The Ceylon Ottar faces the same, if not greater, existential threats, though this does not appear to erode their abiding alacrity for play. Famously family-orientated (so much so that there is even a recorded case of an otter puppy being given by its mother to another mother who had given birth to a stillborn pup), they live in family groups and play and play – when not eating or sleeping.
They are also scrupulously hygienic, with designated areas for otter loos, even though their poo is said to have a scent not unlike jasmine tea. Covered in dark brown fur and about a metre long, weighing in at eight kilos, it lives off fish but is more than partial to any other smaller creature incautious enough to stray close to it in the rivers it inhabits.
It is also famously loquacious; it sounds at the more confident, pay-attention end of the auditory scales. To attract attention to anything from danger to an interesting log, it will whistle or even chirrup like a bird. Loud growls and hisses indicate aggression, and if startled, they vocalised a most human-sounding “HAH!” Hums and coos, rising up and down a set of soft melodic scales, tell you all you need to know about the mother-pup relationship.
And hums and coos are precisely the sort of sound you might care to make whenever you are so lucky as to spot any one of these marvellous mammals. Manifest they may be, but masked, unseen and even obliterated is the possible fate of all these creatures if the so-called civilised world fails to curb its civilising human instincts.
That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.