Sri Lankan Leopard

PANELISTS: Rukshan Jayewardene and Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne

Date:Saturday 4 July 2020

This program is the 6th virtual zoom panel discussion hosted by America Sri Lankan Photographic Art Society in Los Angeles California, USA Member of Photographic Society of America (PSA) and The International Federation of Photography of Art in France(FIAP) to showcase the beauty of Sri Lanka’s fauna and flora. This week’s program will feature the Leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya), a subspecies native to Sri Lanka, classified as an endangered species by the International Union of Conservation of Nature (ICUN).

Mr. Rukshan Jayewardene has an MPhil in South Asian Archaeology from the University of Cambridge with 14 years of field experience in the Sri Lankan early historic period. For the past 25 years he has been a wildlife photographer, writer on wildlife related topics and a popularizer of Sri Lanka’s amazing biodiversity. He has intensively studied the Sri Lankan leopard in the wild and through that exposure been inspired to work for its long term conservation. His involvement with five( non-profit) conservation/environmental NGO’s over a twenty year period, with broadly common goals and like minded individuals, has resulted in both success and failure. He continues to fight for avoidable, biodiversity loss, in order to conserve the common heritage of all Sri Lankans. He sees the current decade, starting with 2020 being a deciding decade for the Sri Lankan leopards both in and outside legally Protected Areas, together with a host of other animals on land that are co-dependent.

Mr. Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne is amongst a handful of field naturalists in the world who have written and photographed field guides spanning terrestrial mammals, marine mammals, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, wildflowers, and trees. He is a passionate naturalist who through 15 books and numerous articles has drawn attention to the richness of Sri Lanka’s wildlife. In the words of British author and television presenter on wildlife, Bill Oddie, no single individual has done so much to raise the profile of a country’s wildlife scene. He is on the council of the London Natural History Society and He is on the council of the London Natural History Society and is the Chair of the London Bird Club.