The Popham Arboretum

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Just south of Sigiriya is a town called Dambulla. I had passed through here on my way from Kandy to Sigiriya, and now I was going back. This time I was stopping overnight for a very good reason called loris. Slender loris to be precise. Grey slender loris to be even more precise.

Apart for the three monkeys I talked about previously, Sri Lanka has two more primate species. The grey slender loris is the more widespread of the two, being also found in southern India. The second one is the red slender loris, found only in Sri Lanka. I would very much like to see a slender loris. One of the species would be great, both of them would be even better. Unfortunately, lorises in general are something of my nemeses. I spend a lot of time looking for them and very little time finding them. So far I have only seen Bornean slow loris once (in 2014) and Sunda slow loris once (a pair of animals this year). The odds wouldn't exactly be in my favour if a person were to be betting on me seeing slender loris: but better to fail than not try at all is my motto.

The ace up my sleeve was the 36-acre Popham Arboretum. This was started in the 1960s by a British man named Sam Popham and has long been Loris Central. Despite the connotations of the name "Arboretum" almost all the trees here are the result of natural regeneration rather than it being a planted garden. There are some mangoes and other older trees from when the land was a farm, but otherwise it is a naturally-regrown forest. Sadly it is now basically an island of forest, surrounded by cultivation and settlement. In the 1990s it was possible to see 20-plus loris in one night here, when there was forest and scrub surrounding the property; now it is more like 4 or 5 a night. Still, it is a reliable loris-finding site and my hopes were high. Or, at least, not too low.

Apart for being able to spotlight in the forest here, there are also a couple of rooms which means you're right in the forest. There are some cheaper hotels along the road, nothing too close, but staying elsewhere means you then have tuktuk costs and if coming in from outside you are restricted to doing a night tour rather than being able to go alone. The manager's name is Jayantha Amarasinghe and I had found his phone number somewhere on the internet (077 726 7951 if anyone reading this needs it). I gave him a call from Sigiriya the night before and arranged a room. One room is 3000 LKR and the other 2500 but he let me have it for 2000.

From Sigiriya I caught a morning bus to Dambulla and then got a tuktuk the rest of the way for 300 LKR. There is a much cheaper way which I found out once there. Whether coming from Kandy or Sigiriya just ask the bus to drop you at the Kandalama Junction then get one of the regular local buses which run along the Kandalama Road for only 10 LKR (or from the Dambulla bus stand it will cost 20 LKR). Popham is pronounced "poppim" and Arboretum has to be pronounced the Sri Lankan way with the stress on the very first syllable and with a hard e not a long e. However it is best known locally as Suddage Watte which means something like "the white man's place" - nobody could understand me when I tried to say this as I was pronouncing it the way an English person would (it should be said Sud-ah-gay Wot-ay).

When I arrived Jayantha took me for a walk around some of the property. There are four colour-coded nature trails threading through the forest, with each marker-arrow being numbered so you can't get lost. Handy for night-time. However he no longer allows people in the forest at night unguided, after having caught a couple of foreigners catching tarantulas to smuggle out of the country. No prizes for guessing they were Germans. Luckily I had enough conservationist street-cred for him to say he trusted me to go out alone, but only after the night tour so he could see whether I knew what I was doing (so I'd pay the 1500 for the tour but afterwards I could spend as long as I wanted wandering around in the dark by myself).

There are lots of interesting native plants on the property, and even better Jayantha showed me where a group of lesser false vampire bats were roosting in a chimney-shaped building. Later in the night he showed me another small building, originally built as an armoury but now left as a "battery", where there was a roost of horseshoe bats. There was also a "crocodile gecko" living there, so-called for the spikes all along its back, but the lens I had on the camera couldn't focus close enough on it for a photo (from googling it appears the crocodile gecko is Hemidactylus leschenaultii) Junglefowl are easy to see here because they are fed on scraps, and giant squirrels seem common as well (I saw four just that afternoon - still haven't managed to get any photos though). I took a walk around the yellow trail for a couple of hours to pass the time. Not too many birds were around, all ones I'd seen at the previous sites, and I saw a couple of chital. When I got back a mention of fungus growing on termite mounds prompted me to say I had passed an entire mound completely covered in tiny white toadstools, like snow on a mountain. Jayantha is a fungus enthusiast and has been cataloguing the species here since he became manager in 1994. He wanted to get some photos of the termite mound, so off we went. On the way we came across some bright-orange dinner-plate-sized toadstools. In 23 years Jayantha had never seen this species at the Arboretum so he got as excited as I would over a giant rat.

I had been crossing my fingers for good weather that night. The heavy rain I'd encountered on previous evenings hadn't given me hope, but I was prepared to stay for one or two more nights if I had to. The lure of loris is strong. Sure enough, at 5pm the clouds burst open and several Amazons-worth of water came pouring out of the sky. The dirt paths immediately turned into brown rivers. I sat around for a bit watching the curtains of rain, then got an umbrella and trudged off to get some dinner at the little restaurant on the road (about 100 metres from the Arboretum gate). I don't mind rain so much, but you can't spotlight in it. Spotlighting works by reflecting the eye-shine of the animals back from your torch-beam, then you try to see them in your binoculars. When it's raining every raindrop reflects light back. Even after it stops raining it is difficult because every leaf is wet and reflective. After eating I came back and sat around some more, had some coffee, waited some more. At 7pm the rain was gone. The sky was still black but there was no rain. Off we went into the forest.

Apart for slender loris, the other mammal I particularly wanted to see was the Sri Lankan mouse deer which was supposed to be very common here. Like certain other endemic animals in Sri Lanka there are dry-zone and wet-zone forms of the mouse deer. Recently the two forms have been split into two full species, Moschiola meminna in the dry-zone (such as here at Popham's) and M. kathygre in the wet-zone. Whether this is actually justified or is just being splitty is another matter.

We hadn't been walking long, maybe five minutes, before the guide motioned at us (Jayantha and I) to come forward quickly. Mouse deer! I just saw its eyes and nothing else as it slunk into cover. I tracked along a bit with my torch where I thought it was heading, and sure enough got the eye-shine back. I quickly got my binoculars on it, and found that it wasn't a mouse deer at all, but a small Indian civet (that is, "Small Indian Civet" is the name of the species). It stood there a minute looking at me, then turned and sauntered off into the undergrowth.

I don't think it was very long before we saw our next animal. Maybe it was ten or twenty minutes. Again it was found by the guide so I'm not bothered in having to pay for the tour because the animal was a slender loris. I was actually surprised we found one. I know they are meant to be reliably seen here, but this is me and lorises we're talking about. The loris was at the top of a tree, probably twenty feet up, but I could see him perfectly well through the binoculars. He sat there amongst the branches staring down at us for a while, then clambered away into the leaves where we couldn't see him any more. There was a second loris a little while later but only the guide saw it before it ran away. They aren't slow animals at all - when they want to move, they really move.

We kept walking round the trails but the only other animal we saw was a mouse deer which was not at all cooperative. I just barely managed to see its shape well enough to say that it was a mouse deer, but not well enough to be happy with having seen a mouse deer. The night tour was just over an hour long I guess, and when it ended I said I was going to go back in the forest until I had seen a mouse deer properly. Jayantha went off to have dinner. I headed back towards the start of the trail, but before I even got there I picked up some eye-shine amongst the trees near the buildings. There was a mouse deer right there! This one was far more obliging than the other one. When the light went on it, it would just sit down like a cat with its legs tucked under its body and stare at me. We played cat-and-mouse for a bit - the mouse deer sitting down for a few minutes, then sneaking to another spot, then sitting down a bit more, while I tried to creep closer. After about five minutes of this I had got quite close, easily close enough to get a really good look with the binoculars. (Fun fact: you can see better through binoculars at night than with your own eyes because they pick up more light).

And that was that. Loris and mouse deer. All done by 9pm. I went to bed early.

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