PREFACE
 
It was the autumn of 1968. I was an undergraduate and aspiring anthropologist at Cambridge University, and I was at a lecture about the lemurs of Madagascar. They were interesting animals, to be sure, but the slides of the southern forests were what transfixed me. Silvery, spine-studded trees snaked toward the sky, and graceful, slender-trunked trees lofted flowers at the tips of silvery branches. I had never seen a silver forest before, and was instantly hooked. I have been ‘living Madagascar’ ever since.
 
This book is about what I have learned. It begins with a nondescript patch of ground in the middle of a huge supercontinent 250 million years ago. The patch drifts south with the supercontinent, eventually breaks loose, and becomes the island we call Madagascar. The land is home to a parade of animals during these epochs. Its most ancient occupants give way to lumbering dinosaurs and furry little mammals, and then they too disappear after an asteroid hits Earth 66 million years ago. The deep, wide sea now surrounding Madagascar makes it difficult to reach, but a handful of animals beat the odds and settle there. Their descendants survive changing climate conditions, retreats and advances of forest and open country, the uplifting of mountains and flooding of lowlands. Somehow, they not only persist but diversify into an array of wildlife unlike any found elsewhere in the world. People start arriving about 10,000 years ago, bringing new plants and animals with them. Within the last thousand years, Madagascar’s largest native animals disappear and its forests recede. Today, forest cover continues to decline and the survival of many remaining animal species is in doubt.
 
I have organised chapters about these events and their causes chronologically, starting deep in the past and ending in the present. The resulting account will doubtless continue to evolve with further research, but it is already far better supported by evidence than the prevailing wisdom about Madagascar. This comes to us from early twentieth-century French colonists, who wrote simply of a timeless, forested paradise invaded and destroyed by people. Although grounded in up-to-date scientific evidence, I came to realise that this book is also a story. Did the sloth lemur really sing? That, we’ll never know . . . My enchantment with Madagascar is lifelong and personal as well as professional, and field experiences and times spent with other researchers are woven into its pages; the interpretation of evidence is my own and others may interpret it differently; and, most important, knowledge itself comes in many forms and mine is only one of them. I delve into these reflections in the first chapter, and in the last I explore what lessons they may hold for the future.
 
CHAPTER 1
Living Madagascar
 
A black-and-white lemur sings high in the trees of a rainforest in the east while a tiny brown chameleon falls on its side and freezes on the ground far below, perfectly camouflaged as a dead leaf; a bird in glorious plumage glides between the tips of branches reaching for the bluest of skies above a spiny forest in the south; a baobab tree stands sentinel in a western deciduous forest, its massive trunk a personal water reservoir. This is Madagascar, crucible for the evolution of a grand diversity of life, for plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth.
 
When I began working there fifty years ago, few people outside the country even knew where it was. Responding to an anxious phone call about me made by my mother in 1970, a Foreign Office official in London inquired whether Madagascar was located in Europe. Things are very different today. The island is now recognised as one of the hottest of biodiversity hotspots in the world, along with regions like Amazonia and the rainforests of Central Africa. Through films, television clear.
 
The delight of almost everyone I encounter who has actually been to Madagascar is palpable. Their pleasure and excitement always puzzle me a little. They are mostly a self-selected group of people with an interest in natural history and the island harbours many unique plants and animals, to be sure. But it is far from being a fully-fledged tourist destination. Accommodations are often quite basic, and travel is slow, exhausting and fraught. Scattered through this book are sights and reveries during hours scrunched up in an assortment of four-wheel drive vehicles and, indeed, it sometimes feels as if I have spent more time getting between places than in them. Madagascar lacks great herds of zebra and wildebeest, prowling lions and leopards, or giraffes and elephants to marvel at. Its animals come mostly in small packages, and the sense of sheer good fortune and privilege at catching a glimpse of them doubtless contributes to their magic. But the enchantment goes far beyond that. A closer look at the lemur, chameleon, bird and baobab with which I began helps explain.
 
The singing black-and-white lemur (Indri indri) is called babakoto, literally ‘father of Koto’ in the Malagasy language. Some animals are actually black all over, although those in my mind as I write look like ‘a primate version of a giant panda’1. They are the largest living lemurs, with exceptionally long hind-limbs that power leaps between tree trunks up to 10 metres
apart. A babakoto has no tail, just a stubby stump. Lemur tails come in many forms – whip-like, foxy, striped – and it is hard not to feel sorry for babakoto, the only species without one. There is no good explanation for the absence.
 
Babakoto live in family groups – a female, male and their young – in northerly areas of the eastern rainforest. The female lords it over the male, as in many other lemur species. A couple will often stay together for many years while successive offspring grow up and eventually move away in search of mates of their own. Babakoto spend much of the day munching leaves and fruit, moving from one food tree to another, or resting. And they sing. A communal roar announces the song, most often in the morning. When the real song begins, the adult couple are the lead singers. The first bars are long notes. After them come wailing stanzas, beginning high and tumbling through several notes to lower wails. The couple sing in duet, although everyone except the youngest animals joins in, and a song may last for several minutes. The sound carries for kilometres across the treetops, and neighbouring groups break into songs of their own in response. Echoes fill the forest with a ghostly lament.
 
Why do babakoto sing? The song is almost certainly a territorial proclamation: ‘we are here, stay away’. But it seems to be more than that. The adult female’s repertoire includes more notes than the male’s, and she moves from one note to the next more quickly. To listeners in other groups, the song in its entirety may communicate who is present – how many individuals, how many males and females. Perhaps it is a way for neighbours to become better acquainted, because direct encounters are rare. Whatever the song’s function for babakoto, it is surely spellbinding for people who hear it.
 
Far down below on the forest floor, the brown leaf chameleon (Brookesia superciliaris) draws no attention whatsoever to its presence. Ramilaheloka, as they are called in some places, are found in many forests in the east, although actually seeing one takes a modicum of luck and a keen eye for small reptiles or, if you are me, being in the company of a good spotter. They have less trouble seeing us, one suspects: like all chameleons, ramilaheloka have the uncanny ability to swivel their eyes back-wards and forwards in opposite directions at the same time. Ramilaheloka are tiny. With bodies no more than 5 centimetres long, they would fit on your thumb. A newly discovered relative, B. nana, is even smaller – it would fit on your thumb print! With a vertically flattened body, a ramilaheloka looks as if someone had stepped on it sideways. Lying curled up on one side with legs tucked in, it bears a remarkable resemblance to a dead, brown leaf. That is just as well. The forest floor where it spends much of the day catching insects with a long, sticky tongue is a dangerous place for a very small chameleon. A horn sticking up above each eye and spines thrust out from its body may intimidate potential predators close to its own size, but they are no impediment for a hungry bird or snake.