Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / Sri Lanka’s Bears, Buffaloes & Boars | The 3 Great “B’s”
Transcript
- Sri Lanka’s Bears, Buffaloes & Boars | The 3 Great “B’s” Of Sri Lanka’s bears, buffaloes and boars, which animal is its Bach? Which its Bhrams? And which is its heroic Beethoven? It is all too easy to mistake what Sri Lankans might call the “Three Big B’s” for Mr Bandaranaike Senior, Mrs Bandaranaike Senior, and Mrs Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. But in fact, Sri Lanka’s Three Big B’s are not politicians. They are its bears, buffalo, and boars. And remarkably, each beast shares a close and initial affinity with those other, and still more famous, Big Three “B’s” of the classical music world: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The buffalo, that most solid, refined, and traditional of creatures ever seen in all corners of the island, is the Bach of the mammalian world. The wild boar, with its laudable pack control and mastery of its environment, is the unmistakable Bhrams of the jungle and grassland, blending the complexity of its world with ease. And the bear, of course, is the Beethoven of the country: powerful, introspective, heroic. “It seems,” wrote Beethoven in his most bear-like mood, “as if every tree said to me, 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express the ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed.” As to the Sri Lankan sloth bear, although it is most often found in the dry zones of the country – such as Yala and Wilpattu – it is never far from trees, for in the trees it finds the ants, honey, and fruit it especially loves. Hanging like the strangest of fruits themselves, they will stay in the branches for hours at a time, often bringing cubs with them to join the feast. Having feasted, it will usually then continue to hang on in the most relaxed of ways, enabled by twenty sharp, curved claws that give it the kind of grip that denture wearers can only dream about. To see one suspended in so complete a seventh heaven is, of course, to call immediately to mind the Allegretto or "Shepherd's song” from Beethoven’s Pastoral itself – that moment when all that remains is pure gratitude and celebration of the tranquillity of the natural world. Even so, the bear is easily tempted to descend from its high table for termites – a food item of indulgent delight, for which their highly mobile snouts are exceptionally well designed. With nostrils closed, the snouts become vacuums, sucking out the termites from their nest. And their long claws enable them to dig the nest ever deeper till the last juicy termite has been consumed. Sri Lanka’s Sloth Bear is a unique endemic subspecies of the very same sloth bear that inhabits the Indian subcontinent, in ever-declining numbers across India, Bhutan, Nepal, and, until recently, Bangladesh. It is a little smaller in size than its Indian cousin, with shorter fur and, sadly, sometimes without the cuddly-looking white tummy fur of its northern relative. Even so, it is no midget, typically measuring six feet in length and weighing in at up to 300 pounds for a male or 200 pounds for a female. Once found in plentiful numbers across the island, they are now in severe decline, with an estimated 500-1000 bears in the wild today. The destruction of their habitats has been instrumental in their decline, but the fear they engender amongst village populations has also played its part. They are often hunted and killed, with a reputation for damaging property and killing or maiming domestic animals, humans running like a wave of terror before them. The “sloth” part of their name is somewhat misleading, for the bears are quite capable of reaching speeds of thirty miles an hour – faster than the fastest human yet recorded. Evolution has cast the sloth bear towards the Grumpy Old Man side of the mammalian spectrum – brooding, bothered, and bold, as if Beethoven’s late soul-searching Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111 had assumed a furry life of its own. Its poor sight and hearing leave it very dependent on its sense of smell, so it can all too often be surprised by what seems like the abrupt appearance of something threatening – like a human – which it will attack with warrior-like ferocity before asking any questions. In this, the bear It is very solitary, living alone in the forest except for those rare moments when it seeks a mate. Reproduction is not its strongest skill, and most females produce a single cub that stays with them for two to three years, the first months of which are endearingly spent living or travelling on its mother's back. D.J.G. Hennessy, a policeman who had a couple of bears on his land in Horowapotana in 1939, noted the emotive articulateness of their paw-sucking. Hed wrote that “ the significance of the notes on which the bear sucks his paw is interesting; a high whine and rapid sucking denotes impatience and anger, a deep note like the humming of a hive full of bees on a summer’s day indicates that he is contented and pleased with life, a barely audible note shows great happiness while a silent suck in which he usually indulges in just before going to sleep on a full stomach denotes the acme of bliss”. It was as if, Hennessy might have added, had he been as musically minded as he was bear minded, the bear was playing out his own version of the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 - the "Ode to Joy". Just as Brahms was seen to take Beethoven’s music to its best and logical conclusion, so too does the Sri Lankan Wild Boar complete some of the limitations of the sloth bear. Unlike the bear, the boar is exquisitely social, living in groups – or sounders. This word originates from 14th-century Norman French to collectivise a group of wild pigs who communicate constantly with grunts and squeals. Like the famous Mosuo from the Yongning lakes of China – one of the world's last remaining matrilineal societies – wild boar packs are centred around an old and necessarily dominant sow who is in charge of all that they get up to – where they rest or eat, wallow, swim, play or grub. Each sounder pack is made up of several generations of boar – all females and younger males, often numbering 20 beasts. By at least their second year, the males will lope off to live alone, like blokes in sheds, returning to the sounder merely to mate, although some have been known to form temporary bachelor groups, like flat-shares for men learning to break free. Mating, like all good things, follows the weather patterns: most encounters occur during the monsoon from September to early March, and very little, if anything, occurs during the dry seasons of June to August. Occasionally, the more eager beasts produce two litters a year. Still, one is the norm, relying on the not inconsiderable investment of days of gestation and usually six little piglets to show for the effort. And in true Mosuo style, where couples living in close domestic harmony and fathers staying to be a key part of the household is regarded as a shocking eccentricity, the male boar, having done his bit, will jog off back to his introverted life. Their communicative skills are not unlike those of Brahms himself, with a broad scope that ranges from the softest pianissimos to the loudest fortissimos, by way of full harmonies, raw registers, and lush orchestration. Low- to medium-frequency grunts maintain group cohesion. Soft purring denotes contentment, and rhythmic grunts denote courtship. Low-frequency growls suggest aggression; squeaks and squeals suggest excitement, their rising amplitude indicating distress rather than elation. A low huffing “Uhk” is the alarm call. In hearing all this altogether, it is as if the sounding has become an orchestra of its own, one busy playing Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op 98, where the final movement is entirely developed to 30 variations on a Bach cantata. Sri Lanka’s wild boar is most magnificently differentiated from its Indian cousin, with whom it coexists on the island, by a crested mane that runs from head to back, sharp features, and a gratifyingly athletic build, a more pointed head and a set of ears. It looks nothing like the naked pink pigs of popular imagination. They can weigh up to three hundred pounds and measure some five feet in length, with male boars being especially formidable in busting these averages. They live right across the island – in forests, grasslands, scrublands, and farmed areas - and, though commonly seen, they have suddenly come face to face with a terrible existential threat: African Swine Fever. This disease struck the wild population just a few years ago and is causing terrifying levels of mortality. Though bonded as Brahms and Beethoven are by the boundless cords of limitless musical greatness, they are, nonetheless, unlettered geniuses before that giant of classical music, JS Bach, whose innately civilised mindset sheltered and articulated every human feeling with dazzling and effortless love. However wild or tormented, ecstatic or thoughtful an emotion is, Bach is best able to help it live safely in the real world. And so it is with the water buffalo, whose herculean life is played out almost entirely under the watchful gaze of men. “I was obliged,” said JS Bach to his musicologist biographer Johann Forkel, “to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.” And no one can ever doubt the prodigious industry of water buffaloes. Pulling ploughs through paddy or heavy loads along bumpy roads, harnessed to help thresh and crush crops, they work 5-hour shifts, breaking for 2 hours to plunge into cooling water to avoid overheating before starting all over again, for 40 years or so. The fortunate ones are merely left in lush green fields to produce milk, which is richer in fat and protein than dairy cattle's milk; the unlucky ones are raised for meat. As wild species, buffalo have undergone countless human-driven reproductive interventions, all focused on making them more useful for specific tasks, and there are scores of variants across the world. The most commonly seen ones in Sri Lanka are the very domesticated breeds such as Nili-Ravi and Murrah, both suitable for high milk production, and Surti, famous for its sickle-shaped horns. In the wetter parts of the country, swamp buffalo can be seen with their lower, heavier build and light grey colouring. All of these are feral offshoots of the buffalo in excelsis – the native Asian wild water buffalo, now so rare on the island that it sits dead centre in the Endangered section of the IUCN Red List, with fewer than 4,000 left. Constructed by loving gods with luxuriant, solid, confident proportions, this wild version of the water buffalo makes its many bovine relatives seem like whispery ragamuffins. Elusive and often aggressive, it has a literary pedigree dating back at least to the Akkadian kingdom in 2,500 BCE. Black to slate grey with generously curved horns and reassuringly stocky bodies, they typically weigh 1,200 pounds, though double that weight has been recorded in some instances. They are avid communicators, making their presence known through a complex set of grunts, gargles, and mumbles, in which tiny variations in tone, volume, pitch, or melody utterly change the meaning of what they say. Like the polyphony that underwrites all of JS Bach’s works, their weaving together of separate yet interdependent sounds produces a distinct and unified auditory melody. Grunts that are mere mumbles are all about everyday communication within a herd, yet expressed with a rare degree of harmonic modulation. Mother buffalo gargle to their calves, guiding them this way or that and warning of danger, the sound emitting with the highly structured, almost mathematical precision that so characterises Bach’s most significant works. And just as Bach suddenly turned to using unique musical instruments to produce expected sounds, so too do water buffaloes grunt, groan, and grumble when feeling passionate, aggressive, or intimidated. All of this is, of course, lost mainly on humans, as indeed was Bach’s music during his lifetime. “My masters,” he was to write, “are strange folk with very little care for music in them.” That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.