Crested coua photographed by Josh Engel of Tropical Birding.
Last week, Josh Engel gave a dynamite talk on the natural history of Madagascar to the Evanston North Shore Bird Club. (As program chairman, I was amazed that 70 people turned out. I usually have to bribe people with food to get that kind of crowd.) As I heard Josh talk, I could not help but think of my own visit there in October 1987 with Phoebe Snetsinger. Some things have changed and some have not.
The most important emphasis must be on what has not changed: Madagascar remains a remarkable destination for anyone who loves nature. Something like 85% of all the species (that is an aggregate of all taxa) that are native occur no where else in the world. It is the fourth largest island in the world, having broken off from the Indian sub-continent some 80-100 million years ago. The long isolation has led to the extraordinary degree of endemism. Another way to express this is that the country hosts 5% of all the planet’s plant and animal species.
What is, in my mind, more amazing still are the biogeographic anomalies. For example, Madagascar has a boa constrictor, a snake that is otherwise an exclusive inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere. The tour I was with actually saw one. Another strange group of animals which we did not see is the tenrec or Madagascar hedgehog, of which there are about twenty species. Their closest relatives are the solendons (there are two species, one of which is paradoxus ). These bizarre looking critters are restricted to Cuba and Hispaniola.
Back in 1987 there had been only two recent bird extinctions: the snail eating coua which lived on a small island off-shore and the Madagascar pochard last noted in 1970. Two other species, the red owl and serpent eagle, were so rare their status was unknown. The last record for the owl had been something like fifty years before and in “deep forest reached by a 50 km hike west of Perinet.” (I told the group leader, that no matter what else we saw, I would be disappointed if we missed the red owl.) Josh showed us slides of massive deforestation going on in much of the country, yet there have been no new avian extinctions and the red owl and serpent eagle have been rediscovered. Further, it turns out that a tiny population of pochards has been recently found in a previously unexplored lake. At some point it would seem inevitable that loss of habitat will lead to extinctions but apparently there is enough left to support just about everything known to have ever been there. And increased scientific scrutiny leads to new discoveries on a regular basis.
So most if not all of the wildlife that was there in 1987 remains and much of it is easier to access, as tourism has grown over the decades. Twenty-three years ago Air Madagascar consisted of three planes leased from Air France. When I was there the president of the country decided he needed one, thereby reducing the total fleet by a third. This meant that we had to fly into the capital Antananarivo (Tana) every time we were shifting to a different part of the country. So in other words, from Tana to Berenty in the south, back to Tana. Then to Fort Dauphin in the north and back to Tana etc. There were only two hotels in the capital that catered to westerners- Hotel Colbert for French speakers and the Hilton for English speakers. Josh tells me that the number has now grown to about six and the Hilton is now the Carlton.
Sickle-billed vanga photographed by Josh Engel of Tropical Birding.
After landing in Tana, our first destination was a wonderful place called Ankarafantsika. Unfortunately, between necessary errands and bad roads, we did not arrive until late afternoon. But even at that less than optimal time of the day, the reserve was mesmerizing. I photographed a Van Dam’s vanga on the nest, which our leader said might be the first such photograph ever taken. (Vangas are a family related to shrikes that are endemic to Madagascar.) The sickle-billed vanga, which sounds like a baby crying, was easily found as it played woodpecker with its outsized beak. And then there were all the chameleons and lemurs: on our very first excursion I was seeing the treasures I had been reading about for years. It is one thing for a place to host exotic creatures; it is another to actually see them on your first leisurely stroll.
Ankarafantsika dripped treasure wherever we looked, so it was obvious we needed to spend the night to even sample what was present. The only two accommodation options were tents or a brothel. Now, I harbor no illusions here- a rural brothel in a desperately poor country would probably be indescribably depressing, but I thought it would make for a great story. In the end, Phoebe Snetsinger (this was her first trip to Madagascar and she had a spirit of adventure second to none) and I were outvoted by our more pragmatic compatriots. I wound up spending the night awake in my tent, anyway, attending to my camera. So it is likely that neither venue would have allowed much sleep, and I will concede that the nocturnal chorus of the forest is undoubtedly more edifying than the alternative. Josh informs me that there are now guest houses at Ankarafantsika so the consideration of off site lodging is no longer even necessary.
Two other highlights of the trip involved lemurs. At Berenty, on the south, ring-tailed lemurs have become so habituated to people they will run up your tripod. Being so close to wild animals, when such proximity provokes no alarm in either species, is always a rare treat. And at the end of our trip we visited the rain forest at Perinet, in the northeast of the country. The haunting visage of the forest, enveloped by heavy cloaks of fog, would have been special even in silence. But the screams of indri transformed the scene into something only remotely related to the world I knew. Try to imagine hump-backed whales singing in the muted light of a forest at dawn. It is not easy.
Indri photographed by Keith Barnes of Tropical Birding.
Ring-tailed lemur at Berenty photographed by Keith Barnes of Tropical Birding.
