Our office annual trip was over and great memories remain. We
were taken to the second largest wild life reserve forest in Sri Lanka named ‘Yala’. It is 378 sq miles.There
was no rain for about five months to this forest so not so greenly. But wild
life was abundant.
The safari jeeps…
A great tree … Species is ‘Ficus benghalensis’
The first to appear was an elephant. It came so close may be
a feet from our jeep and made us absolutely speech less. We were even afraid to
click photos. Follows some shots of him. It received a watermelon from my colleagues
…
Then came the wild buffalo with it’s great horns. Those horns
are about 2 feet long each.
Then some pelicans … and a crocodile. Water levels are very
less in these water reserves in the forest since lack of rain.
Eagles … such magnificent birds.
Butterflies were plentiful. Follows only 2 of them…
There were many deer, but at one time we saw a large heard
of about 200 …
The only wild rabbit we saw…
Some of other birds we were able to capture with our weak
cameras.
Then the greatest surprise happened. The jeep in front of us
was stopped and they were signaling us to be silent and pointing their fingers
toward the jungle. And we searched for few minutes before we spotted the object
of their attention. It was a leopard. The species name is ‘Sri Lankan Leopard’.
It was about 100 meters away from the jeeps and was snarling and running in to
the forest. Our cameras were not good enough to capture the true beauty of that
magnificent animal.
After that there was three more elephants before we reached
the end of the route. It was memorable.
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