Leopards of Yala National Park and Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka's Top Cat - By Stephanie Sears

Leopard image courtesy of Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne
The apparition crosses the red dirt track of Yala Park and before I have had time to savour my first view of a leopard in the wild, it has already vanished in the morning mist. But later on, fifty metres away from us, we glimpse two long spotted tails dangling from a tree, twitching with feline testiness; one paw cautiously advances down the tree trunk and then, thinking better of it, backs up.

Later again, the jeep brakes abruptly and I see nothing but a tangled web of thorny bush. In a passion of urgency, KG, my driver, grips my shoulders and turns me about. Suddenly, like one of those join-the-dots games, a six-month-old cub, sitting demure and calmly by the road, is revealed. Her eyes finally blink away from my own fascinated gaze and, without breaking the relaxed flow of her movement, she wanders off, blurring back into the silvery brush.

"You are so lucky!" repeats KG, delighted.
But am I really so lucky, or is it just easy to see leopards here?

Split from India 5-10,000 years ago
The whole island of Sri Lanka has been a sort of leopard sanctuary since the sea level rose between five and ten thousand years ago. The 23 kilometres of the Palk Strait that separate the island from India's southern tip have allowed the Ceylonese leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) to reign here as the top predator, and more recently to become a major tourist asset. In this 435 kilometres long and 225 kilometres wide land the leopard needs not skulk out of the way of larger predators as he must in nearby tiger country. Sri Lanka is consequently one of the few places in Asia where this champion at stealth may be seen with reasonable frequency.

And yet despite his favourable situation Panthera pardus kotiya continues generally to follow his nocturnal and arboreal habits, and perhaps wisely, since he is on the IUCN's (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) endangered list.

Tourism returning
The country has recently emerged from a bloody and protracted civil war and international tourism had only returned in earnest a month before my arrival. Signs of the recent conflict were still evident: fortified checkpoints, random identity controls along the roads, still closed off areas in the centre of Colombo, the national capital.

End of hostilities - Good or bad?
It is not yet clear whether the return to normalized economic activity will benefit or harm the island's leopard population and its wilderness at large. Certainly the war facilitated poaching and illegal trading; since 2001 the killing of twenty-five leopards was officially reported and it is likely that the real number was much higher (Kittle & Watson 2007). Park rangers in Sri Lanka are still untrained to draft reports on poaching in legal form, and, to complicate matters further, bush meat poachers who provide food to pilgrims during religious festivals frequently have useful connections that turn a blind eye. In some ways, however, the slowing of the economy induced by the war may have helped wildlife to breathe more freely.

Yala has a lot more than just leopards, with 32 mammal species recorded, more than 230 different birds, 100+ species of butterfly and a great deal more. Photo credit Stephanie Sears

Yala National Park
Yala Park lies along the semi arid south-eastern coast and is Sri Lanka's most popular leopard park. Divided into five blocks the park routinely receives day visitors into Block One, and into other blocks by special permission. The official estimate for the island's leopard population hovers between 700 and 1000 individuals while a more precise estimate available for Block One counts just twenty breeding adults plus their cubs, on average, two cubs per litter; however take into account that only about fifty percent of the cubs survive. (Kittle & Watson 2003)

Tourism detrimental to wildlife?
There are signs that Yala Park may be declining as a reserve for the protection and study of wildlife in favour a moneymaking enterprise presenting animals as entertainment rather than as the vital constituents of biodiversity. A more discerning visitor to Yala, though he or she may quite willingly play his/her role as cash provider to the park administration, is bound at times to raise a critical eyebrow. The entry fee for a three hour tour for which driver and car are extra is the highest of many parks I have visited; a park ranger is imposed during the tour, who is unable to speak English and therefore provide any intelligible information, and who serves no other purpose apparently than as silent ballast at the back of the car. Yet this does not stop him from expecting and even demanding a tip. The excuse must be that Yala Park's Block One does offer a better chance to see a leopard during daytime. But why?

Yala hotel
Yala village hotel, considered to be the best in the area, is situated in the park's buffer zone and closest to the park gate. Walking from one's bedroom to the dining-room there is a good likelihood of crossing paths with a wild elephant or a wild boar. These unplanned occurrences of nature are, however, somewhat tarnished by the discovery that animal populations in the park have been assisted for years by cemented water holes and although during the rainy season they fill naturally with rain water, an increasing number of them are refilled every four days or so during the dry season.

Suddenly, like one of those join-the-dots games, a six-month-old cub, sitting demure and calmly by the road, is revealed. Photo credit Stephanie Sears.

Disgraceful traffic jam
As is often the way with those on safari nowadays, it isn't just enough to relax and enjoy what you see. It has become 'de rigueur' amongst the nouveau clique to publicly boast how clever you are by claiming on the public notice board in the hotel lobby that you saw 5 leopards in a tree. As the trademark animal of Yala, the leopard is the absolute ‘must see' without which a visit to the park is only half a success. Consequently, during the safari, drivers use their cell phones to alert each other of a leopard sighting, which in turn creates a disgraceful traffic jam around the leopard(s), a disease which has spread from Kenya's Masai Mara, where the behaviour and reproduction rates of some cats have been adversely affected by mindless tourists paying their drivers to surround confused and frustrated wild animals. It is already evident that animals have become habituated to vehicles and there is little doubt that the number of cars will increase in response to the vigorous promotion being done around Yala .

Beyond Yala Park's showcase, in the central mountainous province lies a less known leopard population where less visible leopards seem, in a way, better off. It is, for example, singularly gratifying to learn from local environmentalists that some Sri Lankans remain altogether unaware of the leopard's existence on their island.

Man and wildlife living close together - Kandy
All hunting being illegal in Sri Lanka the leopard is officially protected across the land, yet the fact that the cat roams beyond established sanctuaries, mostly unperceived, gives nonetheless a thrilling indication that man and wildlife continue to live more closely together than is generally thought possible nowadays. A small 480 hectare forest above the city of Kandy is one such area where leopard presence is only now being studied and the number of cats being determined; three to four resident leopards have for the moment been counted here. (Kittle & Watson 2009)

Central Province leopards
Central Province leopards are used to a cooler, wetter climate than in Yala and also have a different diet. Yala leopards eat mostly axis deer, wild boar, buffalo and sambhur deer whereas Central Province leopards feed essentially on barking deer, porcupine and wild boar, while higher up in the mountains sambhur deer becomes their main staple. Ranging routes for both groups are not specifically known though terrain hypothetically allows Central Province leopards to travel south from around Kandy to reach the Peak's wildlife sanctuary while Yala leopards have the possibility to some degree to travel northward.

Forest on mountain summits is often broken up in patches by tea plantations and home garden agriculture areas which leopards nonetheless cross to reach other forested zones. Photo copyright Stephanie Sears.

Forest on mountain summits is often broken up in patches by tea plantations and home garden agriculture areas which leopards nonetheless cross to reach other forested zones. Successful use of cultivated terrain is a testimony to the cat's adaptation and stealth. There are few human victims resulting from the proximity between leopard and man, and in seven or eight years only two incidents near the Horton Plains were reported.

Stock stealing and poisoning
Seasonal slash and burn agriculture in which portions of forest are burned for cultivation, performed primarily in the dryer regions, has led to the occasional killing of domestic stock by leopards, soon followed by a farmer's retaliation, usually by way of a poisoned carcass. These reprisals by no means guarantee that the farmer has punished the right culprit which may well be a different leopard from the one caught, or another type of predator altogether, for example, jackals.

According to Anjali Watson, co-founder of the Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation Trust of Sri Lanka with her husband Andrew Kittle, these intermittent occurrences resolved by the death of an occasional leopard are a far better outcome (though in fact unfair to the cat) than to make a case of irreconcilable interests. For to demonize the leopard leads invariably to having to compensate the farmer which leads in turn to the fatal implication that wildlife and human activity are incompatible. To the contrary, the leopard's furtive use of tea plantations and home gardens as a transit zone in the mountain region implies in its present status quo a mutual tolerance between human and nature.

Huge reduction in forest
It is in fact only by sharing land with man that the cat can have sufficient room to range and survive if one considers that Sri Lanka's forest cover has been reduced over the last century from 80 per cent of the whole territory to 20 per cent. There are leopards in all the wilderness portions of Sri Lanka except in the more densely inhabited Western Province so that the removal and relocation of individual animals from one area to another does not solve the ‘conflict', the vacant space left by one removed leopard being soon taken up by another, while the newly transferred leopard may cause unwelcome pressure in another region.

Leopards must be allowed to roam
The cultural aspect, defined either by human acceptance or rejection of the leopard's presence in ordinary Sri Lankan rural life, can therefore serve as a fundamental reinforcement of the ecological benefits of preserving this magnificent and top predator of Sri Lanka. By limiting leopard presence to nature sanctuaries there is the risk of reducing him to the status of mere diversion for urban dwellers and tourists and no longer being truly part and parcel of Sri Lankan life. A preservation that does not simply segregate the leopard guarantees a more wholesome and vital relationship between man and nature.

Population growing fast
And yet even within this framework of a tolerable give and take between the two, one cannot help to wonder how long things can last, particularly on an island with a growing population of over 21 million people in need of housing and work. In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere in the world, the biggest menace to the leopard and to wildlife in general remains man himself.

For information on the Sri Lankan leopard see: Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation Trust/ Anjali Watson and Andrew Kittle.