Some 40,000 local officials were deployed to count wild boar, lorises, peacocks, and monkeys near farms and homes during a five-minute period on Saturday morning.

In the north-central district of Anuradhapura, farmer families gathered in open fields to count the animals and record them in sheets provided by the agriculture ministry.

"We are having census during a very short time period to ensure there is no double counting," ministry official Ajith Pushpakumara told reporters in the capital Colombo.

"We are expecting that the results will be about 80 percent accurate. After we have an idea of the number of these animals, we can plan out the next steps to deal with them."

In Anuradhapura, 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of Colombo, residents were out early in the fields preparing for the census.

"We had a very successful count from very enthusiastic participants. They are the farmers who continuously suffer crop damage. Our count was 227 toque monkeys and 65 purple faced langurs," Chaminda Dissanayake, an agriculture department bureaucrat who conducted the census at Anuradhapura's Mihintale area told AFP.

Opposition legislator Nalin Bandara criticised the census, calling it a "waste of money".

"This is a complete failure, a waste of money. What about the pests that attack farms at night. They are not being counted," said Bandara, adding that newer technologies could have been deployed for the counting exercise.

Officials say more than a third of crops are destroyed by wild animals, including elephants, which are protected by law as they are considered sacred.

While elephants are major raiders of rice farms and fruit plantations, they were not counted in Saturday's census.

In 2023, the-then agricultural minister proposed exporting some 100,000 toque macaques to Chinese zoos, but the monkey business was abandoned following protests from environmentalists.

Sri Lanka removed several species from its protected list in 2023, including all three of its monkey species as well as peacocks and wild boars, allowing farmers to kill them.