EARTHLY
DELIGHTS
Opposite page,
clockwise from
top left:
An indri, the world’s
largest species of
lemur; cobweb in the
light; a Boophis Bright
Eyed Frog; a young male
Parson’s Chameleon;
three Verreaux’s sifakas
sit high in the treesThe wider context is also impressive: from 1999 to 2010,
scientists discovered 615 new species in Madagascar, including
41 mammals and 61 reptiles. There is still much to unearth.
We left the capital Antananarivo southbound on a road
winding around hills denuded of trees, the land chopped into
rice terraces. Chickens scratched on the verge beside vendors’
trestle tables laden with pyramids of tomatoes, small plastic
bottles of fuel and carved Madonna gurines. Humped cattle,
called zebu, loitered on the road, accompanied by herders who
probably hadn’t yet reached their teens, each with a scythe
tucked into their belts. I watched an extended family washing
colourful clothes in a silty river, which my guide pointed out
wasn’t just domestic chores; he recognised it as the ritual
sasa, when everybody comes together to rinse the clothes of
a recently deceased relative.
It was two full days of driving before we arrived on the
edge of the Makay. I met the rest of the group—scientists,
researchers, crew, porters, trackers—as well as the tour
leader, Evrard Wendenbaum, the French founder
of NGO Naturevolution, which is trying to secure
ocial protection for the area. Evrard rst came to
the Makay in 2004 but, without any mapping, he
didn’t manage to penetrate the area. “There were
bandits, big crocodiles and people talked about
spirits everywhere, so we got a bit scared,” he said.
“But after Google Maps was invented, we returned.
And then we drew our own maps.”
I ate some rice, downed a bottle of water,
repacked my bag, and then we headed o across
the high plateau under a hot sun. There was a single
wisp of cloud in the sky. Out here, clouds take on
signiicance. At the very least, you notice them
because they oer momentary shade.
Up on the plateau, the vegetation is known as dry forest, a
mix of grass, thorny bushes and deciduous trees. We tried to
keep apace, pausing only to rehydrate, or to study a scorpion
we encountered, while picking hundreds of spines out of our
trousers and our punctured skin. Some of the group were
wilting, some were sick. It was not a fortuitous start.
But then the massif appeared ahead, a panorama of smooth
sandstone domes, carved up by ravines. The pattern of
random geometrics repeated until the horizon, like a caustic
network of reections and refractions. At this dusky time of
day, the play of shadow accentuated the uneven terrain, the
sense of perspective.
It was dark by the time we reached the lip of the canyon; we
abseiled down relying on head torches. Then we swiftly set up
camp, and I fell asleep to the barking hoot of a Madagascar
Western Scops-owl. In the morning, having slept with my
head outside my tent aps, not wanting to miss a thing, I spied
a Madagascar harrier-hawk circling above. The early angles ofThen, in the distance, I heard my rst indri calls. A loopy
high-pitched haunting wail that might suddenly drop an
octave; at times it sounds as uplifting as an aria, yet mournful,
too, full of anguish, even heartbreak. Their call can be heard
up to four kilometres away.
I could never have prepared for what happened next—when
the pair of indri in the trees immediately above me began
to call, too. Their proximity, the power of their voice, the
emotion that they stirred, was suddenly too much to bear.
There are not many wildlife encounters that make you sob,
as I did that morning. It’s true it did sound, as some have said,
as if the animals might be lamenting their demise. The word
lemur comes from the Latin lemures meaning “spirits of the
dead”; it’s as if they were named presciently.
When a plant or animal dies out in Madagascar, it usually
becomes extinct from the planet. Three-quarters of the
island’s estimated 200,000 species are found nowhere else.
The story began when Madagascar, the fourth largest
island in the world, broke away from India some
80 million years ago, allowing it to evolve in
relative isolation. Humans didn’t arrive until a few
hundred years AD making it one of the last land
masses to be settled. And that is what makes the
country so distinct. Madagascar has some of the
highest biodiversity anywhere.
Yet it takes a considered eye to appreciate what’s
here. The creatures are small, rather quirky,
sometimes inexplicable. Such as the Brookesia
chameleon, an inch long, which, when worried,
plays dead, pretending to be a leaf; the Malagasy
giant rat can leap a metre into the air; and the Aye-
aye lemur employs a technique called percussive
foraging, using an extended middle nger to tap on wood, to
search for larvae. The spectacular Madagascan moon moth,
which seems so robust with its vibrant eyespot markings, twin
tails up to 20cm in length and an intimidating ap, lives for
only a week. By contrast, the towering Tahina palm is a self-
destructing tree that owers once every 100 years and then
dies, despite its size; it was new to science just under a dozen
years ago. One of my favourites, the leaf-tailed gecko, is hard
to see even when pointed out, motionless and unsettlingly
well camouaged. I also loved the Parson’s chameleon with
its whorled tail and saccadic eye movement. This is the kind
of wildlife that makes you pause, look closer, unconsciously
hold your breath.
I had come to Madagascar to explore a region called the
Makay in the central western part of the country. There are
few places like this left in the world: little known, mostly
unexplored, with few people living here, and astonishingly
still notching up new discoveries. In the past 10 years, more
than 100 species here have been recorded as new to science.There are not many wildlife
encounters that make you sob,
AS I DID THAT MORNING
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