THE GREAT TUSKER OF UDA WALAWE: An echo through the trees

Rohan Wijesinha

The tragic murder of the Kala Wewa tusker known as Revatha, reminds me of an older sovereign of the forest, who also suffered at the hands of humans.  It has been just over a decade since the search for Walawe Raja was called off, and all of us who had wondrous times with this beautiful tusker resigned ourselves to the fact that he was no more; a possible victim of human – elephant conflict.  He was last seen in 2009 with a terrible wound on his trunk, a gash so bad that the water leaked out when he would drink (http://www.sundaytimes.lk/100912/Plus/plus_12.html).  Immortalized in a BBC documentary, ‘The Last Tusker’, he was not the last of his kind, but those who have succeeded him at Uda Walawe, and tuskers elsewhere, just might be.

Raja was an icon of the National Park, usually coming in during the months of June or July when the herds were beginning their move into its protective boundaries in search of the ready food and water that they could then find here.  In his case, however, it was the need to procreate rather than food that brought him into the Park as being a dominant male, and usually in musth, he pursued the herds in search of females in estrus.  Like the majority of the herds, Raja entered the Park through the Dahaiyagala Elephant Corridor, an ancient elephant range used by them from time immemorial.  This vital path of entry is now under threat, from politicians and their henchmen, and the days of the great elephant movements into this premier National Park seem doomed.  No more will the herds be able to enter, as they once did, and attract the lovely big tuskers after them.  Bereft of healthy populations of elephants, the Park will deteriorate into a mass of impenetrable scrubland not habitable by the larger animals, and the enormous economic benefits it once brought to the region, and to the country, will be lost forever.

The final days

No one has ever found Raja’s carcass.  He had a broken tusk, so his remains would have been instantly recognizable.  He probably wandered to a place of solitude to die away from prying eyes; the eyes of those who may have caused his end.

Walawe Raja was a unique creature, an icon of a National Park that soon earned worldwide reputation for being the one place that a wild elephant could be seen during twenty four hours of a day, on three hundred and sixty five days of a year.  There are one or two young tuskers who flop their trunk over a tusk, and hold their heads up high as did he.  Maybe they carry his genes into the future, if they have a future.   For if the Dahaiyagala Corridor, and the Bogahapattiya Proposed Forest Reserve into which it leads, are destroyed, then they will have none; a fate that awaits all tuskers in Sri Lanka as their natural habitat is encroached on and destroyed, by those who have no thought for tomorrow.

And so this tribute is to that gentlest of Tuskers, Walawe Raja, and to Revatha, so majestic in their prime; and to all the others of their kind who have departed this Earth, well before their time: