Bundala National Park

Bundala is one of the most important pieces of wetland in South Asia and one of the most disappointing safaris in Sri Lanka, and both of those statements are true of the same morning. The reason is not the park. It is that almost everyone who books it has been sold it as something it is not: a quieter, cheaper Yala, with the same animals and fewer jeeps. It has neither. It is a shallow coastal lagoon system with a working salt industry in the middle of it, and the wildlife that makes it internationally significant has feathers.

So this page begins with the advice most pages bury. If you want elephants, leopards, buffalo and the shape of a classic game drive, do not come here. Go to Yala or to Udawalawe, both of which are close, and neither of which will disappoint you in the way this park disappoints people who arrived with the wrong expectation. If, on the other hand, you have any interest at all in birds — not expertise, just interest — Bundala is one of the best half-days available anywhere on the island, and the rest of this page is written for you.

Why the reviews of this park are lukewarm

Read visitor accounts of Bundala and a pattern appears almost immediately. They are rarely angry. They are flat. The words that recur are "quiet", "not much to see", "we saw a few birds and some crocodiles", "nice if you have already done Yala". Very few people say they had a bad time. Very few say they had a good one either.

That flatness has a marketing cause rather than an ecological one. Bundala sits close to the Yala circuit, it is smaller, and the half-day slot it fills is the one nobody has planned. It gets sold as the overflow option: the park you take when the main block is full, when the dates are wrong, or when a driver has an empty afternoon. Nothing in that pitch mentions what the place is. The visitor arrives with a mammal-shaped expectation and is driven around a lagoon.

Judged as a mammal park, Bundala is poor and always will be. Judged as what it is, it is exceptional, and the gap between those two verdicts is the single most useful thing anyone can tell you before you book. A visitor who arrives knowing that the point of the place is a low grey bird standing in three centimetres of water will have a completely different morning from the one sitting in the same vehicle scanning the scrub for something large.

What Bundala actually is

A narrow strip of the south-eastern coast, running roughly east from the Hambantota area, containing a chain of shallow brackish lagoons separated from the Indian Ocean by dunes and a beach. The main water bodies have names worth knowing because a driver will use them: Bundala, Embilikala, Malala and Koholankala. Around and between them are salt flats, thorny dry-zone scrub, patches of open sandy ground, a scatter of larger trees, grazing land at the edges and an active saltern.

The scale is modest. This is a long thin park rather than a deep one, and you are rarely far from the boundary, the sea or a road. It was a sanctuary before it was a national park, and it retains the feel of a working landscape that had a line drawn around it rather than a wilderness set aside.

The water is the whole thing. These lagoons are shallow, saline to brackish, and they fluctuate. They fill with the rains and with drainage from inland, they shrink and concentrate in the dry months, and the mud and sand they expose as they shrink is where the birds feed. Everything of interest in this park follows that rise and fall. A visitor who understands nothing else about Bundala but grasps that the value of the habitat lies in its edges, and that those edges move, is already reading the place correctly.

Ramsar, and what the listing actually means

Bundala is a Ramsar site, and the phrase appears on every sign and in every listing without ever being explained. It is worth explaining, because it is the argument for the park's importance and it has nothing to do with how many animals you will see.

The convention, in plain terms

The Ramsar Convention is an international treaty on wetlands, named after the Iranian town where it was agreed. Signatory countries undertake to identify their wetlands of international importance, to list them, and to manage them so that their ecological character is maintained. A listing is not a designation of beauty, of visitor interest or of rarity in the sense a tourist would use the word. It is a statement that this particular piece of marsh, lagoon, mudflat or reef matters at a scale beyond the country that holds it.

Bundala was the first wetland in Sri Lanka to be listed under the convention, which tells you something about how it was regarded by people who study these systems long before it appeared on any tour itinerary.

Why these particular lagoons qualify

Shallow brackish water over soft sediment is one of the most biologically productive habitats on earth, far more so than the scrub around it. Invertebrates occur in the mud in enormous density: worms, small molluscs, crustaceans, insect larvae, brine shrimp in the saltier reaches. That is a food supply, and it is laid out in a form that birds with long legs and probing bills can exploit across a wide, flat, open surface.

Then add position. These lagoons sit at the southern end of a migratory route that runs from breeding grounds in northern Asia down through the subcontinent. Birds arriving at the end of that journey need somewhere to stop, refuel and spend the northern winter, and a chain of shallow coastal lagoons at the bottom of the island is exactly that. The combination of productivity and geography is why the site qualifies. Neither on its own would be enough.

What a listing does not do

It does not stop water being diverted into or out of a lagoon, and it does not remove the industry, the grazing or the invasive vegetation discussed further down this page. Ramsar status is a commitment and a piece of leverage, not a fence. Knowing that makes the visit more interesting rather than less: you are looking at a wetland being actively managed and argued over, not a sealed exhibit.

The migration, and the months it governs

Almost everything a visitor wants to see at Bundala is governed by a pattern that has nothing to do with the Sri Lankan tourist calendar and everything to do with the northern hemisphere's summer.

The pattern

Waders, ducks, terns and a good number of other species breed far to the north — in Siberia, in central Asia, across the northern steppe and tundra — during the brief northern summer. When that ends they move south, following a broad corridor down through central and southern Asia, and the birds at the leading edge of that movement keep going until they run out of land. Sri Lanka is where the land runs out. The southern coast is the end of the line.

In practice this produces a long season rather than an event. The first arrivals appear from around the end of the southern-hemisphere-facing year's middle months, numbers build through the following weeks, the population peaks somewhere in the middle of the northern winter, and the birds thin out again as spring pulls them back north. As a rough working rule, the productive window covers the northern winter months, with the deepest part of it in the middle of that span. Outside it the lagoons still hold birds, but they are the residents, and the great flocks are somewhere else.

Why nobody should give you exact dates

The timing shifts. It shifts between years, it shifts between species, and it shifts with conditions the birds met on the way. A late or heavy monsoon changes water levels and therefore where the feeding is; a dry year concentrates birds onto fewer lagoons; conditions thousands of kilometres north change when a species departs. Some years the flocks are early, some years they are thin, and some years a particular lagoon that was covered in birds last season is quiet because the water is at the wrong depth.

What this means practically is that a visit inside the broad window is a good bet and a visit outside it is a gamble, and that nobody, including this page, can tell you what will be standing in the Malala lagoon on the morning you arrive. Treat any source that gives you a precise arrival date for a species with suspicion.

Flamingos, honestly

Flamingos are what sells Bundala. They are on the signage, in the brochures and in most of the photographs, and they are the reason a substantial share of visitors book. So it is worth being precise about them, because the gap between the marketing and the reality is where most of the disappointment at this park is generated.

The birds in question are greater flamingos, and they are visitors rather than residents. They are not a breeding population that lives here and can be relied upon. They arrive from breeding grounds well to the north-west, on the salt flats of western India, they use the Sri Lankan coastal lagoons as a wintering area, and they move between sites according to water depth and food. That last point is the one that catches people out. Flamingos feed by filtering, and they need water of a particular shallowness and salinity. When a lagoon becomes too fresh, too deep or too dry, they go elsewhere, and elsewhere might be another lagoon in the same park, another part of the same coast, or another country.

So the accurate statement is this. In a good year, in the right months, with the water at the right level, Bundala holds flamingos, sometimes in numbers that are genuinely startling: a long pink line standing in shallow water with the heat shimmer coming off it. In a bad year, or in the wrong months, or when the lagoon levels are wrong, there are none at all, and a driver who promised them cannot produce them. There has also been a long-running concern among people who watch this coast that flamingo numbers at Bundala specifically have been less dependable than they once were, with birds favouring other lagoon systems along the same shore.

Book Bundala for the wetland and treat flamingos as a bonus. That way round, the morning cannot fail. The reverse way round, it very often does.

The waders, which are the real content of the morning

If flamingos are the poster, waders are the substance. They are also the reason this park rewards patience and punishes a fast loop, because a wader flock is not a sighting. It is a puzzle you work through.

What stands on the mud at Bundala in the right months is a mixed assembly, often several hundred birds of a dozen species feeding side by side, sorted by leg length and bill shape into different depths of water. Small stints work the very edge in tight nervous groups. Sandpipers probe a little deeper. Plovers run, stop and pick rather than probing at all. Godwits, greenshanks and the occasional curlew stand out where the water reaches their knees, and stilts on absurd pink legs go deeper still. Behind them, terns fish the open water and rest on the bunds in lines.

The pleasure of this is not the tick list. It is watching a food resource divided up in front of you with complete precision, each species taking a band of depth and a size of prey. Once you see that, an hour at one lagoon is not long enough.

The difficulty is equally plain. Waders are small, brown, grey and white, they are far away, they are in non-breeding plumage during the months you will see them, and several of them are genuinely difficult to tell apart even for people who have been doing it for years. This is where equipment stops being optional.

Optics, and why they decide the whole day

No other factor changes the value of a Bundala morning as much as what you are looking through. In a park built on large close animals it would hardly matter. Here it is decisive, and it is the single practical point on this page most worth acting on.

Binoculars

A pair of binoculars converts distant specks into birds. Without them, a lagoon at Bundala is a grey sheet with dots on it, and the honest experience of an unequipped visitor is looking at a landscape while somebody names things they cannot see. With them, the same view resolves into flocks, species and behaviour. Anything of reasonable quality works. Bring your own if you have them, because the vehicle will not, and a shared pair between four people means everyone spends the morning waiting.

A telescope

A spotting scope on a tripod or a window mount is the difference between identifying most of what is there and identifying nearly all of it. This park is one of the very few destinations on the island where a scope earns its weight in luggage, because the birds are stationary, the light is open, and the distances are long enough to defeat binoculars. If you own one, bring it. If you are travelling with a birding guide, they will have one, and that alone is a large part of what you are paying them for.

The camera question

Photographers should adjust their expectations. A long lens on a wader flock across a wide lagoon in rising heat produces soft, shimmering images, and the hottest hours are the worst for it. This is a place to watch rather than a place to shoot. The best pictures here are usually not of individual birds at all, but of flocks, salt pans and the bleached geometry of the salterns.

What you can see with no equipment at all

Not everybody reading this owns binoculars, and it would be dishonest to imply the park is closed to those who do not. There is a substantial cast of large, obvious, resident birds at Bundala that need nothing but eyes, and they are why the park is still worth a morning to a moderately curious visitor.

Painted storks stand about in the shallows and are unmistakable at any distance, pale birds with a dark band and a heavy yellow bill. Open-billed storks work the margins in numbers. Spot-billed pelicans sit on the water like small boats and fish co-operatively. Spoonbills sweep their bills side to side through the shallows in a motion that is visible from a long way off. Herons and egrets of several sizes stand in the reeds. Cormorants and darters dry their wings on posts and dead branches. Black-headed ibis probe the wet ground in loose parties. Black-winged stilts are conspicuous everywhere.

Away from the water, the dry ground has its own obvious birds. Peafowl are abundant and noisy. Indian rollers sit on bare branches and turn electric blue when they move. Bee-eaters hunt from exposed perches, lapwings object loudly to the vehicle, and thick-knees stand so still on open sand that they are usually spotted only when they move. Raptors take the tallest perch available, and even without magnification the shape of a fish eagle over a lagoon is hard to mistake.

All of that is available to somebody with nothing, and it makes a good morning. It is simply a much smaller morning than the one available to somebody with binoculars.

The elephants, and why they are not the point

There are elephants at Bundala. This fact is used heavily in the selling of the park and it deserves a careful answer, because it is true and it is misleading at the same time.

The population is small and it is not confined to the park. Elephants move across this whole stretch of the south-east, in and out of the protected area, through the scrub and the boundary land and across ground that people farm. Sightings happen and they can be excellent, because in open lagoon country an elephant is visible from a long way off and there is no vehicle scrum to spoil it. But they are chance encounters on a morning organised around something else, not the reason to come and not a fixture of the itinerary.

The boundary is where the real story is. A protected area this narrow, with farmland pressed against it, sits in the middle of a long-running conflict between elephants and the people who live alongside them. A visitor is unlikely to see that directly, but the electric fencing and cleared boundary lines are visible from the track, and they explain the shape of the park more honestly than any sign at the gate.

If elephants are what you have come to Sri Lanka to see, this page has already told you where to go, and the answer is not here.

Crocodiles, and the rest of the mammals

Crocodiles are the animal most reliably delivered at Bundala after the birds, and there are decent numbers of them in and around the lagoons. Both of the island's species occur along this coast, the mugger of fresh and brackish water and the far larger estuarine crocodile, which is a genuinely dangerous animal and one reason nobody should be casual about the water's edge here. Most sightings are of animals hauled out on a bank in the sun, or of a set of eyes and nostrils moving across a lagoon with no visible effort.

The mammals otherwise are the ordinary dry-zone cast, present and incidental: spotted deer, wild boar, langur and macaque, jackal, mongoose, and monitor lizards large enough to make somebody in the vehicle sit up. Leopards exist in the wider landscape and are effectively never seen here. Fishing cats live in the wetland margins and are nocturnal, so they are a fact rather than a sighting.

All of it is worth stopping for. None of it is the reason the park exists.

The salt pans, and an industry inside a wetland

One of the more genuinely interesting things about Bundala is visible from the track and almost never explained: there is a working salt operation here, and it is not an intrusion that arrived after the park. It predates the protection.

How solar salt is made here

The method is old and simple. Salt water is let into shallow rectangular pans and allowed to evaporate under a hot sun and a steady wind, then moved on through a sequence of pans, each saltier than the last, until salt crystallises out on the floor and can be raked into heaps to drain. The result is the geometry you see from the road: flat rectangles of water in improbable colours, low bunds between them, and conical piles of salt glaring in the sun. The Sinhala word for a coastal salt lagoon, lewaya, appears in local place names and is a clue to what this landscape was doing long before anyone protected it.

Why the pans are good for birds

This is the part that surprises people. Working salterns are frequently excellent bird habitat, and in several parts of the world they support wader and flamingo populations that the surrounding natural coast no longer can. The reason is structural. A saltern is a set of shallow, managed water bodies at a controlled range of depths and salinities, with bunds to roost on and no disturbance beyond a few workers, and that is a nearly ideal arrangement for filter feeders and probing waders. Brine shrimp and salt-tolerant invertebrates flourish in the saltier pans. Flamingos in particular are drawn to exactly this.

The tension, stated fairly

None of that makes an industrial operation next to a Ramsar site uncomplicated. Salt production means water is moved, held and released on a schedule that suits salt rather than birds. It means vehicles, machinery, bunds and periodic works. It means an economic interest with a claim on the same water the wetland depends on, and a workforce whose livelihood depends on that claim being honoured. Conservation planning here is not a matter of removing the industry, which is neither realistic nor obviously desirable, but of managing the timing and the water so that both can continue.

The freshwater problem

A related and less visible pressure runs the other way. Irrigation development inland has for decades sent drainage water down into some of these lagoons, and water arriving from an irrigation scheme is fresh. A brackish lagoon that receives a sustained input of fresh water becomes less salty, and when that happens the invertebrate community changes, the vegetation changes, and the particular birds that specialise in saline shallows find the habitat no longer suits them. This is a slow, undramatic and well-documented change, and it is probably a bigger long-term threat to the ecological character of Bundala than anything a visitor would notice. It is also the clearest possible illustration of what Ramsar status is meant to guard against and how hard that is in practice.

Prosopis, and a problem that was planted deliberately

Look at the dry ground between the lagoons and you will see a great deal of a low, dense, aggressively thorny tree with fine feathery leaves and long seed pods. This is prosopis, sometimes called mesquite, and it is not native to Sri Lanka.

The awkward part of the story is that it was introduced on purpose. Prosopis is drought-hardy, fixes nitrogen, grows on saline ground where almost nothing else will, and produces firewood and fodder, which made it attractive to authorities looking to stabilise dry coastal soils and provide fuel. Those qualities are exactly what makes it a problem once it escapes. It colonises open ground, forms thickets too dense to walk through, and holds ground that was previously open sand, grazing land or lagoon margin.

Why that matters at a wetland is not obvious until it is pointed out. The birds that make Bundala important need open ground and open shallow water with clear sightlines. They do not use thorn thicket. Every hectare of lagoon margin and open flat that closes over is habitat subtracted from the reason the site is listed. The spread is helped along by grazing animals and, in an irony that appears in the local literature on this park, by elephants, which eat the sweet pods and distribute the seeds, conveniently pre-treated, across the landscape.

Control is difficult. Cutting it produces vigorous regrowth from the stump, the seed bank persists, and clearance is heavy work on hot thorny ground. Removal programmes have been run at Bundala and the problem has not gone away. Prickly pear, a second introduced plant, does something similar on the dunes.

This is worth understanding for a reason beyond the ecology: it is the most visible thing in the park after the water, and once you know what you are looking at, the drive stops being a drive past scrub and becomes a drive through an argument.

How a bird morning is paced, and why it is not a safari

Here is the difference that decides whether your visit works, and it is a difference of rhythm rather than of route.

The shape of a good visit

A mammal drive is a search. The vehicle covers ground, because the animals are dispersed and hidden and the way to find them is to keep looking in new places. A wetland visit is the opposite. The birds are already located, in predictable places, in large numbers, and they are not going anywhere. The task is not to find them. It is to settle down in front of them and work through what is there.

So a good Bundala morning consists of a small number of long stops rather than a continuous circuit. Three or four positions overlooking the productive water, with a proper stretch of time at each, will show you far more than a loop that touches eight viewpoints for four minutes apiece. Twenty to forty minutes at a single lagoon edge is not excessive. It is the minimum for the flock to settle after your arrival, for your eye to adjust to the distance, and for you to notice that the fifty birds you first saw are actually two hundred birds of nine species.

What constant movement costs you

Movement is not neutral here. It flushes birds off the near margins before you have looked at them, it prevents anything settling back down, and it consumes the only genuinely scarce resource of the morning, which is the good light and cool air of the first two hours. A vehicle in motion also makes the shared use of binoculars impossible and a scope useless. The visitor ends up with a great many brief impressions of water and no actual sightings, which is precisely the experience recorded in all those flat reviews.

Say what kind of morning you want, before you set off

Most vehicles that enter Bundala are the same vehicles that work the Yala circuit, driven by people whose entire professional instinct is to cover ground and find something large. That instinct is correct where it was learned and wrong here, and it will be applied by default unless you say otherwise. Make it explicit at the start, in plain terms: that you are here for birds, that stopping for a long time in one place is the desired outcome rather than a delay, and that you would rather see three lagoons properly than the whole track network badly. Said at the gate, this takes half a minute and reshapes the entire visit. Said after an hour of bumping past everything, it rescues what is left of it.

Flat, hot, open, and not very big

The physical experience of Bundala needs stating without decoration, because it is the second most common cause of disappointment after the mammal expectation.

There is no relief in this landscape. It is coastal flat, near sea level, mostly under a metre or two of variation, with low scrub, open sand and sheets of water. There is very little shade anywhere on the track network, the lagoons and salt pans throw the light straight back up at you, and by the middle of a clear morning the glare off the pans is severe enough to be uncomfortable without sunglasses. There is usually a sea breeze, which is pleasant and also disguises how much sun you are absorbing. The dry months bring dust; the wet months bring soft ground and standing water on the tracks.

The park is also small, and the usable track network is smaller than the park. A visit here does not have the option of going deep, and there is no equivalent of the quiet distant block that other parks can offer. You will be near the boundary for most of the visit. You will hear the road at times and see the saltern works. On a busy morning you will see other vehicles, though nothing resembling the concentrations that form elsewhere in the south-east.

Take a brimmed hat, sunglasses, water and long sleeves. There is no shade to walk to, so whatever is in the vehicle with you is what you have. None of this is arduous. It is simply exposed, and people who expected a jungle are consistently caught out by how much sky there is.

The middle of the day, which actually works here

One useful thing follows from all of that, and it is the strongest practical argument for putting Bundala into an itinerary that already contains a bigger park.

Wetland birds do not disappear at eleven in the morning. Mammals in dry scrub retreat into cover as the heat builds, which is why every game drive on this island is pushed to the ends of the day. Waders keep feeding, because their feeding is governed by water and by their own need to put on weight, not by shade. Storks, pelicans, spoonbills and stilts stay exactly where they are. Crocodiles are, if anything, easier to find as the sun climbs, since that is when they haul out to warm up.

So Bundala fills the hours that other parks cannot. A morning drive elsewhere that ends mid-morning can run straight into a couple of hours here without the usual penalty. The light is harsher, the heat is real and photography suffers, but the birds are present and countable, and a lagoon at noon is not the empty proposition that scrub at noon is.

That said, first light remains better. It is cooler, the flocks are more active, the light is kinder to a scope and the heat shimmer that ruins long-range viewing has not yet built. If you have a free choice, take the early slot. If you do not, take the middle of the day here rather than the middle of the day anywhere else.

Who should go somewhere else, and who this park is for

The honest service to most readers of this page is to send them away from it, so here it is directly.

• Go to Yala instead if the point of the wildlife day is leopards, or if this is your one big-animal outing and it needs to deliver something dramatic.
• Go to Udawalawe instead if you want elephants at close range and a high probability of seeing them, particularly with children who need something to happen.
• Do not book Bundala as a substitute when the park you wanted is unavailable, unless you have first understood what you are being given instead. Accepting it as a consolation is how the flat reviews get written.
• Do not book it with young children who need visible action. A long stationary stop at a lagoon edge in heat, looking at small distant birds, is a hard sell to anyone under about ten.
• Do not book it with no binoculars between you and an expectation of seeing detail. Half of what makes the park exceptional is literally invisible without magnification.

And now the other side of it. If you like birds even slightly, Bundala is one of the best half-days in Sri Lanka, and the reasons are specific rather than sentimental. Very few places anywhere let you sit in front of an internationally significant wader assembly in comfortable open country with no walking, no altitude, no crowd and no need for expertise. The habitat variety within a very small area is unusual: saline lagoon, salt pan, freshwater margin, dune, scrub and open coast within a few kilometres. The sightlines are open, which is exactly what a beginner needs and what a forest park denies them. Nothing is hidden. The birds are simply out there, standing in the light, in numbers, doing what they do.

Access, and who finds this park easier than most

Bundala is, by the standards of Sri Lankan wildlife sites, one of the more manageable ones for a visitor with limited mobility, and it is worth saying so because so few of them are.

• There is no walking. The visit takes place from the vehicle, start to finish. Nobody has to climb anything, cross rough ground on foot, or manage stairs.
• The tracks are flat. They are unsurfaced and they are rough in places, particularly after rain, but there are no steep climbs, no rock steps and no river crossings of consequence.
• The visit is short. Two to three hours in the vehicle rather than a full day, which matters a great deal to anyone who finds sitting in a jeep uncomfortable.
• The vehicle is the obstacle. Safari jeeps are high, entry is by a step and a hand-up, the seating is bench-style and the suspension is unforgiving. This is the part to raise in advance, since some operators can provide a vehicle that is easier to board.
• Heat and glare are the real limits. For anyone who copes badly with sun, open water and salt flats at midday are a genuine strain. Take the early slot and ask for a vehicle with a proper roof.

Because the birds are what you have come for and the birds do not require you to leave your seat, this is also a park where somebody who cannot manage a strenuous day still gets the full experience rather than a reduced version of it. That is rarer than it should be.

Getting there, and how the visit fits a day

The route pages deal with the driving properly, so only what changes the visit belongs here. Bundala lies in the far south-east, around 245 kilometres from Colombo and something close to five hours on the road, with the last part on smaller roads through the Tissamaharama area. It sits close enough to the Yala gate that the two are routinely done from the same base.

• Bandaranaike International Airport to Yala — 318 km, about 330 minutes.
• Ella to Yala — 115 km, about 180 minutes.

Two things about the arrangements genuinely affect the visit rather than the transfer. The first is that you do not enter the park in the car that brought you; park vehicles do this work, so the car that drops you will not be sitting outside waiting unless that has been arranged as a separate journey. The second is that Bundala's tolerance for a late arrival is much better than a mammal park's, which gives it an unusual flexibility in an itinerary. A visit that begins at ten in the morning is a compromise here and a write-off almost anywhere else.

Where the arrangements are settled already, book a car directly. Other parts of the island are covered in the destination guides.

A plan for a morning at a wetland

1. Decide honestly whether you want this. Read the two lists above. If big mammals are the point of the day, book Yala or Udawalawe and stop reading here.
2. Bring binoculars. One pair per person if possible. This is the item that decides the day, and it will not be provided.
3. Come inside the northern winter window if the migrants are what you want, accepting that the timing shifts and that no one can promise a species on a given date.
4. Take the first light slot for the cool air and the clean viewing, or use the middle of the day as a deliberate complement to an early drive at another park.
5. State the plan before you move. Birds count as sightings, long stops are the objective, and covering the whole track network is not.
6. Work three or four lagoon positions properly rather than touching everything. Give each one enough time for the flock to settle and for your eye to sort it out.
7. Look at the salt pans deliberately rather than driving past them. They are among the best bird habitat in the park and the most interesting thing in it to think about.
8. Treat flamingos, elephants and crocodiles as bonuses. Any of them may appear. None of them is the reason you came.

Bundala rewards a very specific kind of attention and punishes every other kind, which is why its reputation is so much lower than its importance. It is not a lesser version of the park next door. It is a shallow, glaring, working coastline at the bottom end of a migration route that begins in Siberia, and on the right morning, with something to look through, it holds more life in front of you at one time than anywhere else in the country. Arrive knowing that and it is hard to have a bad half-day here. Arrive expecting a leopard and it is hard to have a good one.