Animal Rescue Mission with INSEE

SriLankan Airlines as a conservation minded airline constantly in the lookout for opportunity to partake on conservation efforts. In 2015, SriLankan was invited by the INSEE Cement (former Holcim Lanka Pvt LTD) to be part of a national level endeavor.

INSEE Cement or Siam City Cement (Lanka) Limited is a leading cement company in Sri Lanka who is also a concern corporate who is in to environment conservation and management, invited SriLankan to be part of their unique animal rescue programme. Which is to rescue and relocated slow moving vulnerable species prior to INSEE’s mining process in their main Limestone Quarry Site at Aruwakkalu, Puttalam.

SriLankan Environment unit, responding to this request deployed a team of volunteers to INSEE Quarry site in Puttalam on 11th & 12th December to join the group of volunteers. SriLankan team was led by Sanduni Thudugala, followed by two (2) Properties officers, Mangala Mangalanath and Dharsha Wickramasinghe.

This rescue mission was conducted under the watchful guidance of experts from International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Considering the safety of the participants, the programme started with a briefing on safety and measures that they need to follow during the rescue programme. The participants were also briefed about the types of animals that they would come across during the programme.

Many slow moving, vertebrate and invertebrate animals were rescued both day and night during the rescue mission. Following day all the animals who were rescued were released to safer locations according to their natural habitats. Environmental scientists who participated in this mission declared that this effort managed to rescue more than 600 species and this was indeed a significant rescue mission as there were few rare species among the list.