Welcome to an episode of Wild Isle: the podcast that brings you the stories of Sri Lanka’s Plants & Animals.
This episode is dedicated to Sri Lanka’s Wild Cats.
Once upon a time a dazzling assembly of cats lorded it over the island, at the very apex of Sri Lanka’s food chain.
Some of the most glamorous members of this ancient feline club have long since vanished, predators who themselves fell prey - less to other predators but to climate change, and the accompanying alternations in vegetation.
Others, thriving, or perhaps now just clinging on to life with grim resilience in other corners of the world, never made it to the island in the first place. This, today, is not the country where you might glimpse tigers, lions, cougars, lynx, ocelot, or jaguars slipping stealthily through scrub forests. But, as benefits of one the world’s most notable biospheres, the island has instead as astonishing variety of surviving predator cats, including one that has moulded its appearance so intimately around a particular environment that scientists have eagerly given it endemic status three times over, with a fourth, identified from a small town near Nuwara Eliya, waiting for taxological promotion like a good, albeit dead man before the Catholic Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
The greatest of these is of course the Ceylon leopard. Shrewd, secretive, elusive, it is without doubt of the greatest endemic jewels in Sri Lanka’s mammalian crown. It is the largest of the country's four cat species – the others being the Jungle Cat, the Fishing Cat, and the Rusty Spotted Cat. Averaging six feet in length, head to tail, and weighing anything up to two hundred and twenty pounds, they are mostly solitary beasts, largely but not always nocturnal and with a typical life expectancy of fifteen years.
It is beautifully attuned to hunting, an observer noting that “if the lion is the king of the jungle, then the leopard is the king of stealth,” able to run seventy kilometres an hour and leap as far as six metres.
Despite habitats that stretch right across the island, numbers of the Ceylon Leopard are falling fast and are currently estimated to be around just eight hundred. Contrary to popular belief, they are not just found at the Yala National park but right across the country’s arid, dry, and wet zones, its hills, forests, and plantations. Conservation methods have failed to have any meaningful impact on the leopard population in general and there is little sense of urgency in government circles about the pressing need to do more to protect the future of this apex predator. Habitat loss as much a disastrous history of human-animal interaction is largely to blame for this decline but if nothing is done soon about it the Sri Lanka Tourist Board may have to turn to promoting seagulls. An errant gene in the leopard population provides the rarest of leopards, the Black Leopard, of whom there have been only a few firm sightings. One in every three hundred leopards born has the propensity to be black and so able to live up to Karl Lagerfeld’s gimlet observation: “One is never overor underdressed with a little black dress.”
A much happier story is found with the Asian Palm Civet, more happily known as the Toddy Cat, which lives in generous numbers across Sri Lanka, South and Southeast Asia.
It is a small beast, little more than five kilos in weight, its stocky body painted with gorgeous markings: grey fur with a white forehead, white dots under its eyes and beside its nostrils – a sort of Panda in the making. Luckily, it displays none of the wearisome fastidiousness of the now almost extinct panda and, although primarily forest dwelling, it has acclimatised to urban life with alacrity, making its home in attics and unused civic spaces – and of course, palm plantations. And indeed wherever it can best find the fruit it most prefers. Like the golden palm civet, it is also famous in some countries for producing Civet Coffee, made from defecated and partially digested fermented coffee berries.
But the most interesting civet story is that of the three, possibly four, endemic civets that have suddenly shot across the radar of naturalists.
When life was simple, long ago; and when beige, like black or white, came in just one colour choice, it was thought that the island was home to just one endemic palm civet – an island version unique to Sir Lanka of the more common Asian Palm Civet.
But scientists, zookeepers, and wildlife photographs like Dhammika Malsinghe, Dr. Wolfgang Dittus, Dr Devka Weerakoon, and Channa Rajapaksha have in the past fifteen years worked hard to evaluate this assumption. By careful observation, the checking of paw prints, the measurement of bodies and assessment of markings (beige or off-beige), they have instead come to the conclusion – now widely accepted in the scientific community - that the country actually plays host to three endemic civets:
The Wet Zone Golden Palm Civet
The Montane Golden Palm Civet
And The Dry-Zone Palm Civet
In fact, the debate about numbers is ardently on-going, with some scientists now claiming that a fourth civet also merits separate recognition: the Sri Lankan Mountain Palm Civet, found only in Dickoya, a refinement that makes Darwin's Galápagos finches look almost modest.
But although each civet is zone specific and different enough to be so classified, it would take much effort on behalf of armchair naturalists to ever tell them apart. All three are golden beasts more golden brown on their backs and lighter gold on their stomachs, though the Montane Golden Palm Civet is, the trained eye, a little darker all round. From nose to bottom they measure 40 to 70 centimetres – like large cats; and weigh in from 3 to 10 pounds. They are mild, secretive, forest loving creatures, living their life on trees and in high hollows, solitary and very nocturnal, munching their way through fruits and small animals.
Occasionally they can be a more sociable: for four long months one lived very comfortably in the space between my bedroom ceiling and the roof, a home from home where it raised its many excitable and noisy offspring. Most curiously – and unexpectedly their farts are widely known on the island to be so pleasant as to smell of the flower of the joy perfume tree – the Magnolia champaca, a scent immortalized in Jean Patou’s famous perfume, 'Joy', an odour that outsold all others, excepting Chanel No. 5. Civet Coffee, which can sell for $1300 per kilo, has thankfully yet to make any appearance on the island, associated as it has become with cruel farmed civet practices. The custom, in the past, was kinder, with partially digested and fermented coffee berries being collected from civet poo in the jungle and sold onto ridiculously wealthy Coffee Bubbas.
For lovers of the familiar domestic cat, Sri Lanka has its own wild version: The Ceylon Rusty-Spotted Cat. This is the world’s smallest wild cat, smaller even than most domestic cats and one of the least studied and understood of the wild cat species.
Covered in reddish fur, it is found in dry forests and grasslands and is largely nocturnal, feasting off insects, small birds, rodents, frogs, and possibly small lizards as well as domestic fowl. Territorial, and somewhat abstemious when it comes to sex (once a year, thank you), they produce a litter of rarely more than three kittens after a two month pregnancy.
Found only in Sri Lanka and India, their conservation status is threatened, with unending encroachments on its habitats fragmenting its home range. Billionaires, or at least those still capable of pausing long enough to consider the probity of jets and yachts with gold taps; or clothes and jewellery enough to fill a space craft set for private voyages, migh...
