Off beaten track

A Green Pit Viper (Trimeresurus trigonocephalus) testing the air in Sinharaja.

If you are ever in Sinharaja and you see a small body of water, even something that would be deemed a pond with exaggeration of the highest order, do tread softly. You could be inches from one of Sri Lanka�s most beautiful, endemic snakes, the Green Pit Viper ( Trimeresurus trigonocephalus ). And you don't want to scare it away. Emerald green, yellow and burnished black would probably be an adequate description for this little jewel of a snake. I had never seen one until a trip to Sinharaja in February with the A dventure Lanka crew where we saw around three of them near small bodies of water, the snakes entwined in the undergrowth. Of course these snakes are poisonous, though fatalities apparently have never been recorded, so treat the snake with the outmost respect and you will get some great macro photographs.

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...