By The recently published National Red List on the conservation status of Sri Lanka’s birds has revealed significant threats to birds in lowland rainforests and mountain habitats are the most vulnerable.
Twenty of Sri Lanka’s 34 known endemic bird species have been marked in the red list.
All these birds are only found in Srilanka.
Some of them are now directly in the endangered category while others are threatened and vulnerable.
According to Devaka Weerakoon, chief technical adviser on fauna for the National Red List and a senior professor of environmental sciences at the University of Colombo.
“It is difficult to ascertain the exact nature of these population trends due to lack of long-term monitoring programs in place to track bird population changes in Sri Lanka,”
Sri Lanka is home to 522 bird species, many of them migratory. The red list assessment looks only at the 244 species that breed on the island. It lists 19 of these species as being critically endangered, 48 as endangered, and 14 as vulnerable, points out environmental journalist Malaka Rodrigo.
The report warns of climate-driven changes in habitats further shrinking the suitable range for already threatened and endemic bird populations and some of them may move to India’s Western Ghats where it is cooler.
