Sri Lanka 2017 - Wildlife: mammals and reptiles

We spent most of August travelling around Sri Lanka - from Colombo across to the East coast, down to the south then back via Kandy. Whilst it was not a "wildlife holiday" we did see a lot of nice critters and this is just a selection of some of the best, from mammals and reptiles.
One of the things SL is famous for is it's elephants, with  very healthy wild population. We had some very good views, especially at Udawalawe, although I will start with the most unusual sighting, of "mugger" elephants on the road to Yala and in the park. These two have learnt to block the road and what there until given food allowing the vehicles to pass!

In the parks, Yala and Udawalawe, we saw numerous elephants, mostly in small family groups and all pretty used to tourists in jeeps allowing for quite close views.

Finally, at the elephant orphanage near Udawalawe we saw the semi-wild and hopefully to be reintroduced herd of youngsters getting their lunch!

Elsewhere in the parks, water buffalo were ever present neat the waterholes as were the wild pigs.

Mongooses (mongeese?) were spotted on almost every trip, with a high count of 8 on one drive.

One of our favourite mammals was the giant squirrel. They are the size of a cat and bound around the trees often chasing each other,

and we saw one black-naped have on the road on an early morning safari drive.

There are two common monkeys you see in SL - the tongue macaque and the hanuman langur. Both were seen very often, sometimes in places you didn't expect to see them like drinking out of our plunge pool!

Finally, for the mammals at least, we were amazed at the number of fruit bats we saw. Driving along the road many were hanging from the electricity wires electrocuted! Equally though hardly a day went by without us seeing a large roost in one of the trees, or them flying out at dusk looking like buzzards as they flew along.

Finally, lets move onto the reptiles including the largest, the marsh crocodile which we saw near most large bodies of water.

Almost as large were these water monitors we saw on the beach at Galle. They were hanging about near the fishing boats scavenging any left overs!

You often saw these smaller dragon-type lizards hanging about on walls or termite mounds in the sun.

Overall, it was a bit disappointing that we missed the big beasts - leopard, bear - but we had some good quality sightings of some of the smaller beasts and the elephants were stars!