Wild & Wonderful Diaries

When I first started watching birds, I had no idea of how important it was to keep records - until I found myself writing a long account of our family’s trip to Southern Sri Lanka in 2009. Only a few months had passed after the trip, but I realised that if I wanted to take birding seriously, I needed to start writing things down.

I wrote the first account in pencil from memory, in the relatively neat, oval script of a 12-year-old, in a paperback diary, to which I later gave a nice revamped cover using a bunch of art supplies my father bought a few months afterwards. I called it Wild & Wonderful Diaries. 

This was perfect, I decided. It would be the start in documenting all my travels in crystal-clear detail, from the prologue, and start to finish - hopefully in real-time. Of course, plans are often grand at the start.

Our second trip to Bundala National Park, in 2010, was a good enough demonstration. Just before the trip (at home, mind you) I wrote a nice prologue on our preparations, still in the clear handwriting of an 8th grader.

When we set off on our journey, the often bumpy roads made note-taking very, very difficult. I only noted down the more important or new bird sightings on the way, along with our wayside stops and a very rough timeline. Once we settled down at the hotel, I wrote down the account for the day - a four-page report - and went to sleep.

We woke up bright and early the next day for the safari, and I was ready to write down my notes and extensive observations, sure that I’d finish it as a good account.

This is what happened.

Left: Prep work. Right: Safari notes, page 1, with an annotation in 2019 

Even right after the trip, I had no idea where the sightings began or ended. I could barely read most of what I’d written. Trying to juggle the diary, John Harrison’s field guide, my camera and binoculars was not as magically easy as I’d thought.

One of my other ways of record-keeping, now discontinued, was “The Sight of the Day”. In this, I recorded one bird sighting everyday, mostly during the morning and evening van rides to school, and school hours in between. I don’t have the book I used for it any more, but I can still remember Red-vented Bulbuls nesting on top of a fluorescent light in a classroom, a White-bellied Sea Eagle near the Kelani River and many others.

I started listing bird sightings after a 2014 visit to my mother’s ancestral village, Udadumbara, whose rural environment and wooded gardens provide ample views of mid-hill birds. On our first trip to Talangama Lake, the same year, I began numbering the sightings. I developed the habit of squeezing my notes onto the endpapers of John Harrison’s - and when those ran out, I taped sheafs of A5 sheets so I had a nice notebook-field guide hybrid. When the journey was done, I would carefully untape the sheets and paste them in my diary. Sometimes I’d rewrite the account, adding descriptions where needed, but keeping the numbering.

One day I wanted to count all the bird species I’d ever seen - what seasoned birders call a “life list”. This initially began years ago, when I counted species in Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne’s pocket guide. Afterwards, I moved onto the more comprehensive John Harrison’s guide, and eventually built a Microsoft Access database listing the species, location and status (to which I’ve added and improved since). It was a fun way to get to know the program itself, so I dabbled in forms, macros and reports as well. I’ve now moved it to iOS Numbers, as I’m mostly working on the iPad currently. Although I have a very long way to go, and don’t have the time and resources to go chasing “lifers” everywhere, I’m pretty proud of my life list, coming up to a fair 234 species in total.

Bay-backed Shrike, Lanius vittatus: one of my most memorable lifers.
This vagrant was seen in Bundala National Park, January 2020

This blog has become my latest venture in record-keeping: a way to present observations and facts with a touch of creativity along with heartfelt experiences. I know I have a lot to learn, and I hope this experiment in storytelling will not just succeed but keep improving, in the years to come.