Off beaten track

As a word of explanation, I once spent two months living in a little village in Maragalakanda, close to Moneragala back in 2004. My purpose, living there without electricity or running water, was to study bird diversity in an agroforestry scheme for my MSc. This was when the photography bug first bit so there are some tales worth telling and some photos worth showing, though the latter were for the most part taken with a dinky Canon G3. For more of the Moneragala Chronicles click here . Nuwan jumped off the tree that he had just tied a yellow ribbon to, marking one of our research sites and landed lightly on the rock. He looked at his feet, looked at me initially with no indication that anything was amiss but a split second later his countenance changed. Dare I say he went a bit pale and in rapid succession he did a double take towards his feet and daintily but adroitly stepped aside. Of course not being one to be fazed by anything, especially anything reptilian in...

As a word of explanation, I once spent two months living in a little village in Maragalakanda, close to Moneragala back in 2004. My purpose, living there without electricity or running water, was to study bird diversity in an agroforestry scheme for my MSc. This was when the photography bug first bit so there are some tales worth telling and some photos worth showing, though the latter were for the most part taken with a dinky Canon G3. For more of the Moneragala Chronicles click here . �A perfect picture, where the whole world holds its breath�   That line from the Match by Romesh Gunasekera has been one of my favourite quotes on photography, despite it being not from a real photographer. For me however it holds the line holds a looking-glass quality of an ideal that can never really be achieved in the real world. There is no perfect picture, all pictures have good and bad and there are too many subjects in the world and stories to be told with photography for there t...

As a word of explanation, I once spent two months living in a little village in Maragalakanda, close to Moneragala back in 2004. My purpose, living there without electricity or running water, was to study bird diversity in an agroforestry scheme for my MSc. This was when the photography bug first bit so there are some tales worth telling and some photos worth showing, though the latter were for the most part taken with a dinky Canon G3. For more of the Moneragala Chronicles click here .     Calodactylodes illingworthorum , not exactly a name that rolls off the tongue is it? Luckily it also goes by the somewhat less tongue-twisting name the Golden Gecko. It was, courtesy of my herpetology crazy assistant, my first introduction to the fascinating array of Sri Lanka's Geckos. Rather astonishingly Sri Lanka enjoys a grand total of 42 species of Geckos of which a staggering 31 are endemic to the country , i.e. found nowhere else in the world except our sunny island. Certainly...

For more info on what the Moneragala Chronicles are click here . The Katussa fell from the tree in front of me. As we had taken a general interest in the gamut of wildlife present in the Moneragala area, I walked over to take a closer look. I was a bit taken aback to note that the lizard had apparently injured itself when it fell and had a bright red head. I was even more taken aback when the bright red head turned white. Calling Nuwan over to have a closer look, I noted that it was a bit nervous, scattering through the leaves as I came closer. Nuwan quickly identified the katussa as a somewhat rare lizard known as Calotes ceylonensis , which also goes by the much more lyrical common name of the Painted-Lip Lizard. Notably this species is only found in Sri Lanka and is one of the five lizards of the Calotes genus which is endemic to our emerald isle (as a wildlife geek, I rejoice in such facts as this). We hatched a hasty plan to capture the creature to record its details for posteri...

As a word of explaination, I once spent two months living in a little village in Maragalakanda, close to Moneragala back in 2004. My purpose, living there without electricity or running water, was to study bird diversity in an agroforestry scheme for my MSc. This was when the photography bug first bit so there are some tales worth telling and some photos worth showing, though the latter were for the most part taken with a dinky Canon G3. The first of the Moneragala Chronicles is a slightly edited version of a post I wrote for a blog I used to maintain a long, long time ago. Everybody has those rare moments in life where it all comes together, everything is, for a breathless moment, perfect. One of those moments occurred for me in the backwoods of Sri Lanka in Moneragala where I spent two months in a village doing research for my MSc. After a 5am start which due to unfamiliarity of locations turned into an 8am start, my assistant Nuwan and I took a bone-mashing eight hour bus ride in w...