The full island bird list. Fourteen days.
14 Days / 13 Nights
Two weeks across every major Sri Lankan habitat — Wilpattu, the highlands, Sinharaja, Yala, Bundala, and the pelagic waters off Mirissa.
Two weeks that cross every major habitat on the island — dry-zone forest at Wilpattu, montane cloud forest above Nuwara Eliya, lowland rainforest at Sinharaja, the wetlands and scrub of Yala and Bundala, and finally the pelagic waters off Mirissa. Structured to give the thirty-four endemics a real chance and to add the migrants, the raptors, the shorebirds and the seabirds besides.
From USD 4,250 per person, two sharing. USD 8,500 for two travellers. Half board · twin/double.
Colombo (Negombo)
You are met at the airport and driven the short way up the coast to Negombo, twenty minutes, no more. The rest of the day is recovery: the sea, an early dinner, sleep. The list tends to open on its own, a brahminy kite turning over the lagoon, egrets trailing home along the beach at dusk.
Overnight: Jetwing Blue · Negombo · Half Board
Negombo › Wilpattu · ≈ 4 hours
North through coconut country to Wilpattu, the island's largest national park and the quietest of the big ones. The camp is under canvas, with proper beds and hot water and the forest pressing in around it. After dark the dry zone starts talking: nightjars on the tracks, a fish owl somewhere over the water, things that go unnamed until morning.
Overnight: Mahoora Tented Camp · Wilpattu · Half Board
Wilpattu
A full day among the villus, the rain-fed lakes that give Wilpattu its name. The jeep moves from one to the next through tall forest: painted storks and spot-billed pelicans in the shallows, white-naped woodpecker and Malabar pied hornbill in the trees between, junglefowl working the leaf litter. Wilpattu is shade where the southern parks are glare. Leopard and sloth bear use the same tracks you drive, and the tracker reads the sand for them.
Overnight: Mahoora Tented Camp · Wilpattu · Half Board
Wilpattu › Nuwara Eliya · ≈ 6 hours
The long climb. Leave the dry zone after breakfast and rise all afternoon, coconut to rubber to tea, the temperature falling a degree at a time, until the road levels out at nearly nineteen hundred metres in Nuwara Eliya. The Grand Hotel keeps its fires lit in the evening. Dinner early. The plains tomorrow start in the dark.
Overnight: The Grand Hotel · Nuwara Eliya · Half Board
Nuwara Eliya / Horton Plains
Into the park at first light, when the Sri Lanka whistling thrush still holds the streams. The plains sit above two thousand metres, frost on the grass, cloud forest bent low at the edges. The loop runs past World's End, a cliff that falls the better part of a kilometre, and is best walked before the fog closes it around mid morning. This is the morning for the montane endemics: dull-blue flycatcher, yellow-eared bulbul, Sri Lanka bush warbler, Sri Lanka white-eye. Sambar deer graze the open ground as if you were not there.
Overnight: The Grand Hotel · Nuwara Eliya · Half Board
Nuwara Eliya
The second day up here is insurance, and choice. Victoria Park, five minutes from the hotel, holds pied thrush and Kashmir flycatcher in the migrant months, birds that spend the winter almost nowhere but these hills. The Hakgala road is good for Sri Lanka wood pigeon. And if the first morning fogged out early, the plains will take you back. Your guide reads the weather and chooses.
Overnight: The Grand Hotel · Nuwara Eliya · Half Board
Nuwara Eliya › Sinharaja · ≈ 5 hours
Down out of the cold, the road unwinding from tea into paddy and rubber and then forest proper, five hours to the edge of Sinharaja, the island's last large stand of lowland rainforest and a UNESCO World Heritage reserve. Jansen's Bungalow sits close to the trees. In the evening the frogs take the shift from the cicadas. Somewhere out in the dark, a frogmouth.
Overnight: Jansen's Bungalow · Sinharaja · Half Board
Sinharaja
A full day in the reserve with a tracker who knows its moods. The forest hunts in mixed flocks here, the wave: orange-billed babblers streaming through first, a greater racket-tailed drongo policing the edges, and inside the commotion the ones you came for, red-faced malkoha, Sri Lanka blue magpie, green-billed coucal. The method is patience. Stand still, and the forest crosses the trail around you.
Overnight: Jansen's Bungalow · Sinharaja · Half Board
Sinharaja
The second morning is for the difficult ones. The Serendib scops owl, a bird science did not name until 2004, roosts low in the tangles, and the trackers keep note of it. A Sri Lanka frogmouth sits its day roost like a broken branch. Spurfowl call from the slopes and sometimes, at last, show themselves. The afternoon is for the verandah and the rain, if it comes.
Overnight: Jansen's Bungalow · Sinharaja · Half Board
Sinharaja › Tissamaharama · ≈ 4 hours
Out of the rainforest and east, the country opening and drying by the hour, to Tissamaharama, an old tank town on the edge of the southern parks. The tanks start the evening list: pheasant-tailed jacanas on the lotus, openbill storks in the dead trees, painted storks gliding in to roost. The jeep comes early tomorrow.
Overnight: Kithala Resort · Tissamaharama · Half Board
Tissamaharama / Yala
A full day in the park, breakfast and lunch packed in the jeep. The lagoons and scrub hold the dry-zone set: painted stork and lesser adjutant, black-necked stork for the lucky, Malabar pied hornbill, white-bellied sea eagle, peafowl displaying at the track edges as if the park were theirs. Elephants stand in the tanks. The leopard, if one crosses, is by-catch, and on a birding day that is the right order of things.
Overnight: Kithala Resort · Tissamaharama · Half Board
Tissamaharama › Galle · ≈ 2.5 hours
Bundala at dawn, a morning jeep through Sri Lanka's first Ramsar wetland. In the northern winter the lagoons hold shorebirds in their thousands, godwits, stints, plovers, and sometimes greater flamingo in the far shimmer. By afternoon you are west along the coast in Galle, at the Lighthouse, with the ocean loud below the windows. An early night before the boat.
Overnight: Jetwing Lighthouse · Galle · Half Board
Mirissa
Out of Mirissa harbour at first light, past the fishing fleet, to where the continental shelf drops away close to shore. The blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, feeds off this coast in season. Around the boat are the birds no land list can offer: flesh-footed and wedge-tailed shearwaters, bridled terns, brown noddies, storm-petrels skimming the swell. Back by early afternoon with salt on everything. The evening is for the fort ramparts, or for nothing at all.
Overnight: Jetwing Lighthouse · Galle · Half Board
Galle › Colombo · ≈ 2.5 hours
The expressway north to the airport, timed to your flight. Fourteen days, every major habitat on the island, and a notebook that will take some typing up. The north and the east are a different list again, for another year. You know where we are.