Let’s plant trees for future generation - The first activity for 2010

What an event to start the New Year!!! We all like to follow the ritual of planting a tree on a good occasion so this time all at ECO-V started the New Year with planting 90 plants around a tank. We had around 100 more plants remaining from our nursery we started for Pelican Conservation Project at Udawalawa. All were very healthy Kumbuk (Terminalia arjuna) plants which is a very important tree species to enrich catchment areas at the water sources.
There were 10 volunteers at the tree planting campaign which took place at Panahaduwa tank in Udawalawa where we have recorded around 230 Spot-billed Pelicans once. It was a very short notice we gave to the “Friends of Pelicans” to join with us on the 7th of January to plant the trees. We started the mission at 10am and completed it by 2.30 pm and came back to Colombo on the same day. All were very tired but were very satisfied about the great mission accomplished. It was very nice to see the plants which we planted last year at the same tank. They had grown up (about 4 feet) and looking healthy. It’s a known fact that these plants have to protected from the free roaming buffalos in the area. Buffalos love tender kumbuk plants. Once they graze the plant gives new leaves and slowly the stem become much harder and after that level plants will grow slowly with out any threat from buffalos. Therefore it takes at least 2 to 3 years for a plant to grow up to a certain level. One day these will be fully grown trees and hopefully they will provide roosting and breeding habitats for many Pelicans and other birds .