travels with janne

Well, readers, you may wonder why I have not yet mentioned Madagascar’s crown jewels: the lemurs. That is because I have been saving the best for last.

Scientists do not agree on how many lemur species there are, because it depends on which type of classification you use. However, they do agree that there are numerous (in the area of 100 according to Wikipedia) lemur species, and more keep being discovered. Some of them are recently extinct, and most of the living species are threatened by extinction.

Lemurs are primates but like none other in any part of the world. They have evolved separately over the millennia with no competition from the more intelligent primates like chimpanzees, and no serious threats from large predators. So they are a peaceful, mostly tree-living bunch with a very high cute factor. Here is a black and white ruffed lemur chilling out at our lodge: 

Here is another one posing under more natural circumstances:

The red crowned lemur is not particularly shy of humans:

Neither is the red ruffed lemur:

The black lemur has striking green eyes and red lips. So does its pup:

This brown lemur also has a pup. The brown lemur grunts like a pig:

The Eastern bamboo lemur, also known as grey bamboo lemur, is active during the day:

The ring-tailed lemur’s most striking attribute is its beautifully long and stripy tail:

Here it is eating soil to get at nutritional minerals:

The indri is the largest of the lemurs:

As if size isn’t enough, the indri makes an incredibly loud, piercing noise that can be heard several kilometres away. It is almost deafening when you are standing right underneath. It is not an alarm call but rather a “Hey guys, what’s up?” call. Don’t forget to turn on the sound when you watch the video:

Lemurs are agile on both the ground and in the trees. The diademed sifaka swings with ease from branch to branch in the trees and also leaps well on the ground. The russet coloured individual on the ground is a red ruffed lemur while the tiny lemur is a bamboo lemur:

A gremlin in the night
There is one species of lemur that is not cute and cuddly or even anything approaching attractive. In fact, it is downright weird-looking. With its gremlin-like appearance it is something only a mother could love. It is the nocturnal aye-aye, in a lemur family all by itself.

Its coarse and scraggly fur coat looks like it has been dried at too high a temperature. It has bulging eyes, porcine nostrils, floppy ears and long, continuously growing incisors. Weirdest of all are its hands with the witch-like long and bony fingers. The middle finger is particularly long and is used to dig out larvae from dead wood.

Have a look at an aye-aye eating a fruit in the video:

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers lemurs to be the world’s most endangered mammals. They are threatened by deforestation and hunting. The fear is that 90 percent of all lemur species will face extinction within the next 20 years. Before we humans came along and converted the forests to rice paddies and grasslands, lemurs were found all over the island. Now they are restricted to approximately 10 percent of the island’s area – and they are found in the wild nowhere else in the world.

Knowing that lemurs and other Malagasy endemic species can disappear in my lifetime prompted me to put Madagascar at the top of my bucket list. Now at least I have seen these wonderful animals but my hope is that coming generations will also have the opportunity.

Back on the road, and on our way south, we visit a lush rainforest, which, fortunately, was declared a national park in 1991 to protect the recently discovered golden bamboo lemur.

Protecting the lemur’s habitat in Ranomafana National Park simultaneously protects the habitat of all the other plants and animals that live here, including 12 species of lemur and a number of other endemic species. One of these endemic species is the spectacular 15-20 cm wide comet moth, which only lives for a few days.

Ranomafana National Park is also known for its orchids.

While I take this picture, a frog keeps croaking. Following the sound, I find this little guy, which I introduced you to in a previous blog post.

Another nifty creature we spot in the rainforest is the giraffe-necked weevil.

As we progress in a diagonal, southwesterly direction, the landscape becomes more arid and rocky, the farms less fertile, and the poverty more apparent. The typical two-story brick houses we have hitherto seen are replaced by one-story thatched cottages.

Finally, all is just rocks, cliffs and dry earth.

We go for a long and hot walk in the arid landscape.

I spot something that looks like dancing snowflakes, as you can see in the video below. In reality, they are juvenile flatid leaf insects having a bit of a tussle with each other. The white stuff is a waxy substance they extrude to deter predators. Pretty cool!

Many of the plants here are spiny, spiky and prickly.

Others are succulents. One of my favourite succulents is the elephant’s foot plant with its delicate yellow flowers.

My all time favourite, though, is the baobab tree, which is also a succulent. We go for a morning walk in a protected wood with lots of these wonderful giants.

The baobabs in Madagascar belong to different species than the ones you see see on mainland Africa. Some of them look like bottles.

Because they are not ravaged by elephants, they grow straight.

I have often wondered what a baby baobab tree looks like. Well, now I have the answer:

Madagascar is a large island (smaller than Texas but larger than California), so we do not have time to visit all of it. As it is, we do a lot of driving and pass through many interesting landscapes in the southern half of Madagascar.

In a previous blog post, I told you about the agricultural landscapes. Even though they have replaced the natural landscape, they are nevertheless very photogenic.

On the east coast, we travel along a river to visit a village where the inhabitants make use of both a lagoon and the ocean to make their living.

Children play, young people relax, and adults mend their nets, tend their fields, fish, and collect shellfish.

Even the dogs are active. This one takes a break from gathering shellfish to greet a little friend, perhaps inspired by the name of the boat (“mon ami” means “my friend” in French)

Not all is idyllic; the coastal village contributes to deforestation as witnessed by this boatload of charcoal.

Naturally, not all the land in Madagascar is fertile and well suited for farming. The southern part of Madagascar is arid and stony. It is therefore even more disturbing to see that the natural vegetation here has been supplanted by farming and other human land use, leaving the land open to soil degradation and erosion.

However, it is not just this part of the country that has issues with deforestation and erosion; the problem is everywhere. Previously, 80 percent of Madagascar was covered by forest.

This is what an untouched rainforest looks like.

Now only 16 percent is covered by forest. The rest has been laid bare in order to farm crops, graze, harvest wood for fuel, produce charcoal for fuel or produce bricks from the soil. Everywhere you look, you can see bare mountainsides and smoke rising from new areas being cleared.

Well tended fields look nice and produce necessary food, but in the background you can see how the mountains are deforested and laid bare to erosion.

The heavy clay soil is also used for making bricks.

Trees produce oxygen, store CO2, hold on to the soil and are home to a wide range of plant and animal species. Without trees, the soil in hilly Madagascar washes into the rivers when it rains. The result is quite clear: brown, muddied waters that are not conducive to fish or plant life…

…and eroded chunks of land (bottom left hand corner in photo below)

Without trees, the lemurs, chameleons, tree frogs, orchids and other forest-dwellers lose their homes. Since Madagascar is an island, these creatures have nowhere to escape. The missing escape route is why they became endemic in the first place.

My heart cries when I see the rampant deforestation that will wipe out the endemic species in the not too distant future.

As travelers in Madagascar, we eat well. The country’s multicultural history, including Far East, Indian, African, Arab and French influence, is reflected in the food, which is tasty, varied, and well-spiced (although not hot). Almost every day we have a choice of vegetarian, fish and meat dishes, all of it based on local produce.

The hard-working people who make all this happen are the Malagasy, as the inhabitants of Madagascar are called. There is no typical Malagasy, as they are a blend of several cultures.

The first wave of Homo sapiens came to this somewhat remote island about 1000-2000 years ago – not from the African continent but from Polynesia, more specifically Borneo and thereabouts. In general terms, they are the ones who grow the rice on the fertile soils of Madagascar.

Note the white-painted face of the woman in the middle of the above picture.

Later on, Bantu people from the southeast part of the African continent came to Madagascar. They established their kingdoms along the relatively unpopulated coastlines. Even later, Arab and European traders and settlers came by and, as time passed, people intermixed with each other, as is evident in the food, farming practices, culture, religion, language, and people’s appearances.

The present Malagasy people belong to 20 different ethnic groups who inhabit each their region, roughly speaking. About half of the people are Christian and about 10 percent Muslim. The remaining 40 percent adhere to traditional beliefs based on ancestor worship. One of their customs is to place the bodies of their loved ones in decorated mausoleums.

After a few years, when all that remains of the corpse are bones, the family removes the coffin, washes the bones and inters them in a more permanent location, such as in a cave, like the one on the face of the cliff in the middle of the photo below.

The coffin in the photo below once held the body of a child.

Perhaps the child’s bones are now in the cave in the upper part of the photo below.

Although Madagascar is a poor country, acquiring food does not seem to be a problem. Well-tended fields are ubiquitous. Farmers, male and female, young and old, toil in the fields, turning the heavy soil with the aid of ox-pulled ploughs, planting rice by hand in the flooded fields, digging irrigation canals, and tending the cattle that graze on the narrow strips of grass between the fields.

Crops grown include rice, maize, coconut, cassava, tomatoes, yams, barley, bananas, green beans and other beans, sugar cane, sweet potato, vanilla, and, of course, the famous (and tasty) Madagascar pepper. Tobacco is also grown as a cash crop.

Flooded rice fields are ubiquitous in Madagascar.

Planting rice by hand is a wet-footed, back-breaking job. Each rice seedling is planted individually.

The bright green fields contain rice plant seedlings.

In addition to zebu cattle, farm animals include goats, sheep, pigs and chickens. Fish supplement the diet. The results of all these efforts are sold at colourful and lively markets, which are everywhere and seemingly operate all week long.

Even more entertaining and sometimes downright odd-looking are the chameleons. They have several charming features.

Camouflage is the name of the game. Many if not most of the chameleons have a palette to choose from so their skin colour can change to suit the background or the branch they are sitting on.

When not in use, it is practical to curl your tail neatly under you like a violin scroll.

Some of the species have heads and noses with spikes, horns or frills that make them look like miniature dinosaurs.

The photo directly above does not show mating but walking all over someone who is not moving out of the way.

Eyes that pivot in every which direction independently of each other enable the chameleon to have a 360º view. Very practical for the chameleon but quite disconcerting for me!

Their tong-like feet and toes make it possible to grasp and walk along thin branches.

As you can see in the video, chameleons think twice (or three or four times…) before taking the next step. Don’t forget to turn on the sound to hear the following two videos.

If you hang around chameleons long enough, you may be lucky to see their long, fast and sticky tongues in action. They are perfect for catching unsuspecting flies.

Other reptilian species of notes are the geckos. The day geckos are colourful and zip about.

The aptly-named leaf-tailed geckos sit totally still and are so incredibly well camouflaged as leaves that they can be hard to spot.

Some are rather ghostly in their appearance.

It will probably come as no surprise to my regular readers that animals have my main interest. Madagascar has a wealth of nifty indigenous creatures to satisfy even the most well-travelled animal lover. Let’s start with some of the cold-blooded ones that I really like: frogs.

There are more than 500 frog species in Madagascar, almost 10% of which are endemic to the island. 200 of the frog species remain to be described, so there is still a lot of interesting work for scientists for years to come.

This little one belongs to a genera of tree frogs called bright-eyed frogs. One look at them and you can see why.

This is one pointy-nosed dude! If it does not yet have a name, I will call it the Janne-nosed frog. But I think it might be the Madagascar bright-eyed frog.

Another frog with a pretty obvious name is this plump, red one, aptly called the tomato frog. When frightened, it puffs itself up. If that doesn’t work against a predator, and the predator grabs it in its mouth, the tomato frog secretes a thick substance from its skin that causes the predator’s eyes and mouth to go numb and voilá – the predator lets go of the frog.

I think this might be a western bright-eyed frog.

One giant leap can bring this tiny, unidentified frog far on the seemingly vast expanse of leaf.

As far as I can see, this is a male starry night reed frog. The females are even more spectacular.

If any of my readers find that I have identified the frogs incorrectly then please contact me or comment on this blog page.