the lemurs stole the show

I'd been told by several people that I needed to hurry up and get to Madagascar - that it is being deforested at a rate of knots such that soon there will be no habitat left for the amazing wildlife that currently inhabits this wondrous island.  So I organised a three-week holiday there.  Super-expensive - the second most expensive trip I've undertaken behind Antarctica - but people had spoken so highly of the place that I felt it would be worth it.

I went with the birding company I use a lot, to make sure I had the best chance of seeing ground-rollers, mesites and the sickle-billed vanga, but I was equally attracted by such bizarre creatures as the giraffe-necked weevil and the hissing cockroach - and who can resist lemurs?  As you can see from the picture (these are rescued pets now in a reserve), I certainly can't!

The biggest surprise to me was the number of lemur species - more than one hundred!  & there are enormous differences between them, from the tiny little mouse lemurs we saw leaping around the trees at night and trying to sleep in the day, to the big indris with their amazing eerie-sounding (and VERY loud) call. Maybe you can get an idea of the size of the
black and white ruffed lemur in the photo.  I saw some 22 different speices, I think, my favourites being the famous ring-tailed lemurs and some of the sifaka species.  Many of them are endangered, but this is due to habitat loss and not to predation by humans, so many of them are relatively unafraid of humans allowing you to see them at close range.  At the Berenty reserve the ring-tailed lemurs, whilst wild, would try to sneak up to the breakfast tables to steal food.

But the habitat destruction is clearly evident, with charcoal on sale beside the road in every village, wetlands being turned into rice paddies, large swathes of land burnt to prepare it for crops, and whole areas of spiny forest removed to make way for sisal plantations.  Here was one sad remaining tree:

Amongst all this were also large numbers of different chameleons and geckos, a few snakes, frogs, scorpions, spiders, a couple of different tenrecs.  The landscapes weren't bad either.