A week in Sri Lanka part 4

One last post covering the reamining Sri Lanka birdlife we saw, mostly near-passerines. Then I'll take a break, and later I'll post up the mammals, reptiles and invertebrates.

Malabar Pied Hornbill. What a bird! Huge, bizarre, spectacular. But sadly also rather shy and rare, and I only managed rubbish photos of the two that visited woodland near our hotel.

If Sri Lanka's birdlife could be said to be lacking in any way, it would be the seabirds that let the side down. There just aren't that many. From the coast we only saw Whiskered and Great Crested Terns, and from the boat trip we did on our last day (more about that later) we only added Bridled Tern, a lone Red-billed Tropicbird, and some of these - Flesh-footed Shearwater.

Gorgeous creature - the Indian Roller. We saw a few, including this one on day one in Negombo.

I saw this lone Little Green Bee-eater two days in a row on the same overhead wire, near farmland.

A real stunner, the Orange-breasted Green Pigeon. Seen in a wooded area near farmland.

The pretty Spotted Dove is very common in all kinds of habitats.

A distant circling 'raptor' turned out on closer inspection to be this - a Spot-billed Pelican.

A Coppersmith Barbet, showing off its 'beard' of bristles.

Another, less striking barbet, this one is Brown-headed. Both barbets were seen in farmland near Dambulla.

Not my finest hour photography-wise but I'm including this anyway because it shows (just about) one of the best birds of the trip - an Indian Pitta. Saw this just outside my hotel room at dawn, too dark for more than 1/4 sec shutter speed. If you want to see what an Indian Pitta is supposed to look like, there's a lovely photo of one here.