I recently had the opportunity to visit Sri Lanka, a little over three hours from Bangkok by plane, and I booked a hotel close to the airport for my first night as I arrived at around 4pm and did not want to start travelling overland through the evening. Looking online there were lots of hotels in the area and with a quick look at Google maps I located King’s Gate Airport Transit Hotel which was a very short walk from a Buddhist temple on the edge of a fairly large greenspace which would give me the chance for an hour or so of birding before dark and a little time the next morning before getting some transport to my first proper birding site of Kitulgala. Sri Lanka is a very birdy country so it turned out that the spot I chose served up a good number of interesting species in the very short time that I spent there including several with ranges either restricted to only Sri Lanka or Southern India and Sri Lanka.

On arrival in Sri Lanka one of the first birds anyone is likely to see is Yellow-billed Babbler (after House Crow). This busy bird hangs around in gangs in more or less any scrap of habitat and is obvious from its frequent chirruping and garrulous behaviour. It only took me a few metres walking towards the temple before I came across a few groups of Yellow-billed Babblers, an easy species to get some photos of and one which becomes very familiar very quickly.

The temple, with a large fruiting tree and surrounding unkempt wetlands proved to be good place to see some of Sri Lanka’s commoner birds with species such as (Western) Spotted Dove, White-throated Kingfisher, House Crow and Common Myna very much in evidence but large areas overgrown with Typha contained some noisy and smart Ashy Prinias which were easy to observe as they called from the stems of the emergent vegetation.

A pair of Brahminy Kites were soaring overhead with small groups of Cattle Egrets passing by constantly while a distant White-bellied Sea Eagle was a little bit of a surprise to me in such a habitat. Red-vented Bulbul quickly became a familiar sight here and sound I recognized came from a nearby Plain Prinia. However, the call of a woodpecker got me excited, I like any species of woodpecker, and this one turned out to be a very smart one; Red-backed Flameback, awesome.

The call of barbets are always easy to recognize, even if the exact species might be unfamiliar. Brown-fronted Barbet was easy to see, with its large size and abundance I saw several but the endemic Crimson-fronted Barbet was a bit harder to get a good view of. Eventually I saw one well but was unable to get close enough for a really good photo so this one had to do.

Photography aside it was still nice to find an endemic birding from the hotel and while Green Imperial Pigeon, Black-hooded Oriole, Blue-tailed Bee-eater and Ring-necked Parakeets were all nice another endemic species in Sri Lanka Green Pigeon eclipsed them all.

Pale-billed Flowerpecker is a range-restricted bird that I saw feeding on a fruiting tree along with several Asian Koels, a male Loten’s Sunbird and bag loads of Common Mynas and House Crows. I had already seen several Purple-rumped Sunbirds although they had been little more than a silhouette so a male feeding on the fruit was nice to catch up with.

Of course I would be visiting beter birding locations over the coming days but this spot illustrated how abundant birdlife is throughout Sri Lanka with a wide selection and good number of species seen in a short space of time. Some flyover Eurasian Spoonbills evaded my camera but were a nice sighting and I also added Purple Sunbird, Oriental Magpie Robin, Purple Heron and Red-wattled Lapwing to the growing list. I also took some time to photograph some of the commoner and more widespread birds too.

When arriving in another country it is always nice to be able to get straight out and see at least a selection of common birds and with the hotel that I selected the habitat patch just 150 metres away supplied me with a quick fix of Sri Lankan birds before moving on to a more recognized birding location at Kitulgala, an area of forest and village groves that would prove to be full of exciting species.

Join me on my next birding trip to Sri Lanka - Sri Lanka Endemics Birding Tour