By Siobhan Manuelpillai
Roughly 381 km southeast of Colombo lies the charming bird sanctuary that is Kumana National Park. Adjacent to Yala National Park, it too boasts similar, if not more, breath taking scenery and wildlife. Yet, unlike most of our country’s most popular parks, it also presents the unadulterated experience of what a true nature lover would seek in a wildlife park.
Having grown up in a family of nature-lovers and wildlife photography enthusiasts myself, I’ve spent half my life amongst the bustle of people in the city and the bustle of insects and birds in the jungle – a back and forth between two distinct environments and experiences that, over the years, have begun to lose the distinctions that held them at extremes.
Yet, my first and most recent trip to Kumana National Park was like a homecoming to the true park experience that I had fallen in love with as a child – the kind of experience I had long since taken for granted.
Even before I could enter the park, my expectations were almost mockingly subverted. With Yala National Park as a frequent haunt of my family, I’d long since considered data coverage as a given in most parts of the park. I’d grown accustomed to being able to take my work into the jungle.
When I was told to prepare myself for a trip with no cell phone coverage, I held stubborn to the thought that it was an exaggeration – until my signal bars were sliced off before I’d even reached the park office. In the next three days, I was taken back to my early visits to Yala, when I would similarly have to flail my phone around for a bar or two.
Yet the breath taking views of the park stopped even the habitual glances at my phone. Perhaps it was the fuel shortage or perhaps that Yala is the more promoted of the two parks, but for the first time in many years, I was surrounded by the sight of sprawling meadows, jungle, and lagoons/tanks with nary another jeep in sight except on the rarest of occasions. Even in the midst of fortunate sightings – both in proximity and duration – I was more taken aback by the privacy and calm with which I was able to experience them.
Here was a park as beautiful as the others in my country with as much to offer that had thus far avoided the exploitation that commercialisation had wreaked on much of the parks I had lost love with. One with rutty roads less travelled on, skittish wildlife, and little to no litter on the sides of the tracks. A park with an incredible array of avifauna and the phenomenon of their nesting and breeding grounds. A phenomenon worthy of public awareness yet only known to specific interest groups and professionals.
Suffice to say, it left a deep impression on me and reminded me of what a wildlife park should be and what conservation truly looks like. I was made humble by being put at nature’s mercy, outside the reach of technology, closed off from the world and in an environment where I was the minority and flora and fauna the more predominant.
However, while I marvelled at it all and wished others could experience the same and appreciate it as I did, I also couldn’t escape the fear of what fate awaited this park too should people capitalise on its potential.
(Siobhan Manuelpillai is a storyteller with an interest in many art forms including writing, illustration, animation and theatre. When she’s not pursuing the cats in the wild, she’s being lorded over by her cats at home. She is a committee member of the youth wing of the WNPS)
The history of wildlife protection in Sri Lanka is almost synonymous with that of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society of Sri Lanka (WNPS). At 128 years old, the WNPS is the third-oldest non-governmental organisation of its kind in the world and was responsible for the setting up of the Wilpattu and Yala National Parks in Sri Lanka and of the formation of the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC)
