While in Colombo, I managed to squeeze in a bit of birding and go to Thalangama a few times with a few family friends. This is another Thalangama Tank trip report.
As usual, we started very early.We walked up a small creek that flowed into a large lake. I managed to see purple swamphens, pheasant-tailed jacanas and some tiny tadpole-like animals here.Apparently 3 species of kingfisher can be found at Thalangama- the common, white-throated and pied kingfishers. We had gone up the creek to try and find one. When we came back along the creek we got an interesting bonus- a secretive yellow bittern and a water monitor lizard swimming.
A water monitor. These lizards are common at Thalangama.
We soon got back to the main lake. At the lake we saw the usual birds- yellow bitterns, white-breasted waterhens (like moorhens, but they have white bellies), purple herons, little cormorants, pond herons and various egrets. Unfortunately, we couldn't spot any leaf monkeys. For information on most of those birds and other animals, you can look at my other posts on Thalangama. The birds I haven't shown before are shown below.
A pond heron in breeding plumage
A white-breasted waterhen
An Oriental Darter (this bird was in a tree, nesting with some purple herons)
A purple heron
A pheasant-tailed jacana
I enjoyed being able to show two more people the magic of this wetland just a few kilometers away from the center of Colombo. It was a great day birding, and I also managed to get a very good shot of an oriental darter.
I think that pretty much sums it up.
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