AT NIGHT ALL CIVET CATS AIN'T GREY! WAYHAY!

Channa Rajapaksa is a banker from Sri Lanka. Already that opening sentance sounds like a line from one of Pete Sinfield's sillier songs for Emerson, lake and Palmer. Those of you of a certain age listen to Jeremy Bender from Tarkus, and you will see what I mean. But he is a banker with a difference.

A few years ago there was a godawful NatWest advert on British TV showing a young bank clerk with the sort of post-Thatcherite wannabe yuppie look on his face that made you want to hit him, going out on the town with a vacuuous bimbo after he had finished work. No wonder we have a global recession. However, if bank employees were all like Channa, the world would be a different place because Channa is obsessed with civet cats.

Civet cats are - of course - not cats at all, but carnivorous mammals of the Viverridae, which are found across tropical Asia and Africa. There are in the region of twenty species, and one of them (and the recognition of a severely overlooked second species) are completely down to Channa.

According to the Sunday Times website:

The first time he saw a real-life civet is etched in his memory. “It was dark and the animal had been slaughtered for its meat. Although known as the ‘golden palm civet’ its fur was brown,” says Channa. It was chocolate brown (P. montanus) and not golden, leaving Channa puzzled. How could that be when the stamp indicated the latter? “The people called it the Sapumal kalawedda because it emits a scent similar to sapumal,” he explains.
Channa

Then a year later, he was able to trap a few and they too were brown. The crucial question came to mind – is this another species? Doubts assailed him, he was not a scientist. He was talking to scientists and experts, introduced by Sampath Goonatilake of IUCN. Some scientists had indicated that mention had been made in the 1700s of another species but the name decided on had gone into disuse.

Then an aged golden palm civet walked into his trap at Kalupahana in Knuckles. DNA tests were tried but failed. A further surprise awaited Channa. In another trap he had laid at Knuckles was a golden palm civet with three prominent stripes (P. stenocephalus) on its back. “Usually the single stripe is not very prominent but blends with the other fur, but this was not so,” says Channa. The thought that raced through his mind was whether there was a third species.

Read the rest of the story here...