Thalangama Tank and Marshes is a very well-known birding site, located in the Western Province. The distance from Colombo to Thalangama is rather short and takes just thirty minutes at most. In fact, there are plenty of nature reserves like this but Thalangama Tank & Marshes is one of the less well-known places. Birding, strangely enough, is among the best things to do in Colombo in such places. Among the unique aquatic birds that live here are the pheasant-tailed jacana and the Asian paradise flycatcher. The former is a bird with widely spread feet that distributes its weight evenly. This enables it to walk on lotus leaves and rafts of floating vegetation, thus also earning their group the name “lilytrotters”. This particular species of jacana also has a long tail similar to a gamebird, namely a common pheasant. Some of the other avifauna to be found at the reserve include a number of other aquatic birds. There are the ubiquitous egrets and other heron species found around Thalangama.

Paradise flycatchers come in two varieties, a white North Indian migrant and a brown local variant. Both of them are regular garden visitors. The males of both variants grow elongated tailfeathers that trail behind them like streamers whenever they fly. This is a form of convergence with the actual birds of paradise and the African wydahs. There are also purple-faced leaf monkeys here, a large black primate with shaggy fur and a more silvery or whitish rim around their cheeks. Seated in the trees they seem rather intimidating and foreboding to most, with their large size compared to the commoner toque macaques and the slim Hanuman langurs. Water monitors, the largest lizards in Sri Lanka and powerful semiaquatic carnivores are found here

Written by Vasika Udurawane for Travel Lanka Compass