Elephants in Sri Lanka

Elephant is the star of Sri Lanka’s wild life and the largest land animal in the island. among the two verities of African elephants (elephas coxenda) and Indian elephants (elephas maximize maximize), in Sri Lanka you find Indian elephants and considered to be intelligent than their African counterparts hence domesticated.

Although there have been about 36000 elephants with the start of this century it has reduced up to about 2000 due to pouching. according to the recent records about 2000 of them scattered all over the country in small pockets and about 500 of them are domesticated.
“Pinnawala Elephant orphanage” is dedicated to help these endangered species and has sofa become a success. Also few National parks like “Udawalawe”, “Lahugala” are mainly reserved for wild elephants. Major attraction of Yala national park is wild elephants. any given time you can see large number of baby elephants and female elephants. In a herd you always find female elephants and sometimes herds of male elephants too could be seen. in case babies are looked after by mother, aunt or another female elephants and male elephants are loners and never live in a group and are attracted in to a group during the mating season (from September to October ) only and most of the parks are closed for visitors during this period.

Their average height (height is measured to the shoulder)goes to about 8 feet (2.5m) and 1800 Kg in weight and consume about 200 kg of foliage and grass per day and plenty of water for drinking and bathing. Female elephants give a birth once in 4 years and 2-3 babies in their life span. get 4 sets of teeth and every 10 years a new set of teeth is coming to get the last set when they are about 40 years old. walk about 20 miles per day and young female elephants are reedy for mating when they are 13 years old.

very active in the night and most of them sleep under large trees in the day time. only a few tuskers can be seen in Sri Lanka due to bruthal killings to get their tusks due to high value. However new laws has introduced to protect them and let tomorrow's people too see them.
Some people believe that they have grave yards and come near to a water resource when they are about to die…some do not believe it and say ..when they are old their teeth are wasted and difficulty of consuming heavy branches of trees made them come to a place where there is grass and water.