The fourth-largest island in the world, Madagascar also ranks as one of its poorest countries. Most Malagasy people earn less than $2 a day. The main road traversing the center of the island, a thousand miles from north to south, is riddled with potholes the size of refrigerators, making travel slow. It allows one to gaze at the beauty of the landscape and the industriousness of the people, who virtually live outdoors selling their vegetables or charcoal by the side of the road. The juxtaposition of vibrant green rice paddies terraced up the mountainsides with red-clay earth and the tidy brick homes made of it is stunning. This beauty comes at a price. The island used to be covered with forest.
Two thousand years ago the intrepid and most skilled sailors the world has ever known, the Polynesians, colonized Madagascar, as they had thousands of islands in Indonesia far to the south and east across the Pacific. When they arrived they found huge animals: the Elephant Bird, related to the Ostrich but ten feet tall and producing an egg equal to 180 chicken eggs, a lemur as big as a gorilla, giant tortoises, and crocodiles. As with large animals anywhere they did not survive this human invasion and disappeared within a few hundred years.
Madagascar’s long isolation as a landmass produced more unique creatures and plants than anywhere else on earth. These endemic species are almost all threatened with extinction today as the human population continues to expand, obliterating the forests on which so many of the species depend. Only 7 percent of the original cover is left.
The island is not electrified for the most part, so people rely on charcoal for heat and cooking. The Malagasy depend on rice, eating it three times a day. Paddies, although basic and beautiful, are extensive as they replace forest after forest, and more lemurs, chameleons, and boa constrictors lose their home.
There are more than a hundred species of lemur. More are being discovered every year even as some are blinking out. They occupy specific niches: some high in the canopy eating flowers or fruit, some low and nocturnal eating leaves or insects, some leaping across the grasses like so many acrobats let loose on a holiday. They are comical like the bouncy Ring-tailed Lemurs, mournful like the large Indri, whose high-pitched whoop rings through the forest, or scary like the Aye-aye, which seem dressed for a Halloween fright night.
My twin grandsons Mac and Finn were nine when they decided where they wanted to go on their twelve-year-old trip with Nana. Finn said he needed to see where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for so long on Robben Island, South Africa. Mac wanted to see Lemurs and other endemic species in Madagascar, fearing they might not exist when he was older. In 2015, we set off together on a great adventure while they were still eleven, just short of their twelfth birthday.
Robben Island is within view of downtown Cape Town—a long spit of low scrub and sand surrounded by shark-infested waters that ensured prisoners could not escape. Apartheid, the policy that segregated blacks and kept whites in power, is as dark a legacy of South Africa’s past as slavery is of America’s. What is celebrated, however, is the grace and fortitude of one man, Nelson Mandela. Being confined to a small cell, sleeping on a thin mat, laboring in a quarry for eighteen years on the island, and nine years elsewhere, forged a giant of a man who rose above despair, embraced nonviolence, and changed his country forever. Should we forget, in the tumult of violence that embraces eras like our own, that human beings have greatness within them, we need think only of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela to know what is possible for our species.
Tom Moses was a political prisoner for many years on Robben Island. Now he leads tours through the very rooms where he slept and labored. His story of survival, forgiving his jailers, and returning to the island to tell his tale was deeply moving. We were quiet on the boat ride back to town.
The next day we drove farther down the coast to visit a colony of endangered South African Penguins grunting to each other in courtship on the beach and tearing grasses and twigs from the sands to line a depression for nesting. In a bay farther south, Southern Right Whales and their calves fed on plankton before their summer migration. And even farther south, in Gaansbai, the boys donned wet suits on a shark-diving boat and were lowered into the water in a cage just seconds before a Great White Shark careened through the murky water inches from their faces. “Awesome!” they shouted, giving the thumb-up sign. The ten-foot shark was not after the boys; she was after the chum thrown into the water to lure her near. Nana stood on deck taking pictures. The marine biologist said that little is known of their breeding patterns and where they rear their young. Because it is a species in deep decline it is vital to learn as much as possible.
We could have spent another week in Cape Town, but we had a date to see the great mammals of the world in the Bataleur Nature Reserve bordering Kruger National Park. We were alone in the small, neatly tented camp along with our guide, Wayne; the tracker, Doc; and my friend Gary Allport and his son Jude, who joined us from Mozambique. Gary is senior adviser to the CEO of BirdLife International, which represents 120 countries. I met him as a member of the BLI’s advisory group. He is an ace birder, and Jude at nine was well on his way to becoming the same.
ALL SEEN AT BATALEUR NATURE RESERVE, SOUTH AFRICA, 2015
An Emperor Moth with eyes on its back
Giraffes and Zebras keep watch together.
A Leopard sleeps with a full belly.
A giant millipede
A baby Hyena looks at us curiously.
Our days were spent in an open Land Rover roaming the vast scrub savannah watching Elephants browse leaves and tear saplings down to get at them. Giraffes at a higher level extended their great tongues, curling them around green acacia branches. Zebras and Impalas stood like security guards alert to encroachment by Lions and Leopards. A Warthog crashed our picnic lunch one day and Wayne, easy and respectful, quietly shooed him away before he was able to snatch a sandwich from the table.
We were fortunate to see eight White Rhinos, so heavily poached throughout southern Africa that they are threatened with total annihilation, as are Northern White Rhinos, now down to only three, all in captivity. One White Rhino horn is now worth as much as $80,000 on the black market.
The boys, for whom all moving things are worthy, scrutinized the smallest lives, those of dung beetles, and leaf bugs. The ten-inch millipedes crawled up their arms with the titillating brush of a hundred little feet, while a Black Mamba rose to half its height by the side of the road to peer at us. Doc taught us the tracks of animals covering the dusty paths and dry stream beds. We never saw a Lion, despite following tracks of a female and her cub. She was hiding him away for safety. But a beautiful Leopard lay sleeping against a large inactive termite mound in the evening light, her belly swollen after a meal. The peace of the reserve and the calm of the animals used to nonaggressive humans made it a kind of Eden.
We had a passion for birds and were blessed with numerous sightings of Hornbills and a couple of Ostriches. The best one, though, was the male Korhaan, or Red-crested Bustard, engaged in a bizarre courtship display that entailed shooting straight up in the air about twenty feet, turning over, spreading his black feathers like an upside-down umbrella, and dropping back down to earth. This outlandish behavior may have failed to impress the females, but we thought it was super.
The boys were in heaven. Their love of exploration and discovery was fulfilled at every turn, and after night rides capturing eye shine in our flashlights of owls, rodents, or a Wildcat, we would tumble into bed and be ready at 4:30 the next morning for another excursion.
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We flew to Madagascar in the second week of our journey, encountering a totally different environment, hardly Africa at all. Over ninety million years the island evolved into a benign, almost predator-free atmosphere. There was only one cobra to fear, few poisonous insects or frogs, no poison vines, and nothing to threaten the lives of human beings except extreme weather. One could walk through the forest with ease. The lemurs feared only the Fossa, a catlike creature that preys on the
m, a few raptors, and some human beings who hunted them for food, pets, or pelts.
Patricia Wright is a lemur expert. She discovered the Golden Bamboo Lemur as a young woman doing research in the rainforests of Ranomafana in the south-central part of the country. We became friends when she won the Indianapolis Prize for her scientific achievements. The prize from the Indianapolis Zoo, given by the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, comes with an unrestricted cash award of $250,000. This biennial event is like the Academy Awards for field biologists. It is a gala evening celebrating their accomplishments. I became involved as mistress of ceremonies the first year and was honored myself in 2012 with the first Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador Award for my promotion of conservation and field biologists. The JAGWAA I call it, noting to myself that I am never far from the love of great cats.
Pat met us at the airport and we began the nine-hour drive to the research institute Centre ValBio, which she founded in Ranomafana Park in 2008. It is a stunning modern building housing dozens of visiting scientists who come to work on all kinds of species, from lemurs to leeches. I was given a private room reserved for professors, while the boys bunked in a room on the floor where the researchers and grad students lived.
The “Bat Team,” a group of scientists hailing from Spain, Finland, and Britain, along with local Malagasy, had just discovered a new bat species and gave a presentation on the importance of bats as insectivores, particularly for certain agricultural crops. The “Frog Team” also worked at night, suiting up in climbing gear to capture the tiny amphibians from the watery center of large ferns or high in the tree canopy on leaves or bark. These guys and gals, most of them in their twenties or thirties, were “very cool,” in the words of the boys. They spent their days logging information on their computers and their nights roaming the forest with headlamps. I could see Mac assessing the possibilities of science as a career. Finn might gravitate to something more art related; he carefully composed every photograph. “All knowledge will serve you,” my father used to say, no matter what the future holds.
My birding friends tell me you have to get a child before he or she is eleven if you wish to imprint birdsong and behavior deep within rather than having it pass through the intellect first. It is like learning a language. A first language is never lost. It can be revived many years later even when unspoken for decades.
I sometimes struggle with identifying songs and calls because I came to birding so late. I will never be a master birder, but I know enough to know how much I don’t know. Mac was smitten when he was a baby. He would watch birds at our feeder before he could crawl, and one of his first words was “dub,” for the Mourning Doves he saw.
I took him on his first Hawk Watch when he was two and a half. He gazed up at the sky, calling out “cwow,” “hawk,” “bwuejay,” or “seagull” unerringly, to the surprise of adult watchers. His powers of observation were so acute that he had absorbed the look—the “jizz,” as birders call it—of a bird, without needing to break down the details of color, feathers, or size to ID. Most of us can do this if we see loved ones walking at a distance—we can tell who it is simply by the way they walk, the way the parts of their body move together. The top birders identify birds this way, by sight and sound, and they began at an early age.
I watched as my grandsons absorbed all the new sounds and sights with ease and had the ability to recall them days later. I wondered how long it would stay with them, particularly when puberty hit and all focus shifted to raging hormones.
Our initial walk in the lush Ranomafana rainforest resulted in our first lemur sighting. High in the canopy was Patricia’s own discovery, the Golden Bamboo Lemur, crunching on a bamboo stem and allowing small pieces to rain down on us. She was beautiful, her gold-hued coat glowing in a late afternoon shaft of sunlight. In the days that followed we watched a Red-bellied Lemur youngster torment his parents and siblings with bold leaps onto their backs and heart-stopping jumps from branch to branch. The Greater Bamboo Lemur occupied a different niche nearby and munched on a different part of bamboo, making it possible for the different species to thrive together. Darwin would have loved this, I thought.
The tiny Mouse Lemur came out at night and was lured into view by bits of banana and mango placed on a branch. Its big eyes were caught in our flashlights for only a few seconds before it scampered away with the fruit.
Greeted one morning with a heavy downpour, Pat suggested we go south, where it “never rained” and Ring-tailed Lemurs held court. Huge granite boulders and bald mountains left over from glaciations dotted the landscape in the southernmost tip of the country. Anja was home to several troops of Ring-tails. We had barely alighted from the car when a family leapt across a field heading for a ripe mango tree. They were hungry, greedily pushing the soft yellow fruit into their mouths, taking little notice of our cameras. The boys inched closer and closer until they were just two feet from an inquisitive youngster who peered at them with equal curiosity: primate to primate.
The scene was bucolic. A herd of Zebu cattle knee-deep in a lake pulled on submerged grasses and the granite rocks rose majestically into the blue while lemurs draped the mango trees like so many holiday decorations.
A Ring-tailed Lemur, Madagascar, 2015
We saw several of Madagascar’s three hundred or more chameleons, fifty-nine of which live nowhere else. No chameleon, however, was as wondrous as the giant one in Ranomafana that measured two and a half feet from tip to tail, its tongue unwinding like a blob of bubble gum for twelve inches to flick in a grasshopper.
The lemur expert and anthropologist Patricia Wright
Pat’s love of lemurs was contagious. She loved everything about Madagascar, but the expanding human population was destroying more and more forest in its effort to thrive. The people slashed and burned trees to create new rice paddies or taro crops, or to mine the many minerals and gems Madagascar is blessed with. Each forest fragment is home to some unique creatures, and when that home disappears, they disappear along with it.
As an anthropologist, Pat knows it takes a village to safeguard anything. While we were at Centre ValBio, Pat met with elders to discuss the illegal gold mining that was taking place in the park, cutting into the forest, polluting the waterways, and disturbing the wildlife. The perpetrators, whom they called “bandits,” were outsiders armed with guns, a frightening situation for the unarmed Malagasy.
With the blessing of the people she helped protect Ranomafana Park by establishing rules to benefit animals but also to give employment to the Malagasy as guides, rangers, and foresters. She boosted the ancillary benefits of tourism through encouragement of local crafts like weaving and embroidery, eco-lodges for tourists, and better health, education, and welfare for the local community. When she is not teaching at New York’s Stony Brook University, she is raising money from public and private sources for Madagascar and its wildlife.
Promoting the wonders of Madagascar is easy for anyone who is fortunate enough to visit even a small part of the land as we did. The problems of keeping it wonderful are ongoing. It is a country that needs an infusion of bold ideas in infrastructure: green energy systems, transportation, agricultural practices, and tourist facilities. Madagascar could be a model for the world, particularly in thinking how to address climate change. (Richard Branson and Bill Gates, are you reading this?) The Malagasy are bright, congenial, and hardworking. Without thoughtful development the country will topple toward bankruptcy—economically, yes, but also bankruptcy of the people’s future and that of the unique animals and plants that inhabit only this fragile part of our world. We are all the poorer if they disappear—the magic that is Madagascar, the dream that is Africa.
PART 3
THE BODY OF THE EARTH
When Dad and fellow Harvard alumni physicians shipped out for Britain just a month after Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, my mother, my baby brother, and I moved with another mother and her three small children to a house where we waited out the war
years together. The house was charming, with a vine-covered trellis draping the side porch and a rabbit warren of rooms all the way to the attic. It was the sunken garden, however, and the panoply of diverse, stately trees—oaks, sugar maples, and a glorious magnolia shading the driveway circle—that struck me so vividly at age three. It is my first memory of beauty.
These were no ordinary grounds. Ninety-nine Warren Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, was the home of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York City and countless other parks. He is called the father of our country’s municipal parks and of the art of landscape design itself. He was also one of America’s first conservationists who entreated the public to follow the lay of the land and native cultivation when gardening.
The great man was forty years in his grave when we moved into 99 Warren, but the firm carried on under the tutelage of his sons. A dozen draftsmen were bent over high desks in a long light-filled building attached to the second floor of the house, giving us children easy access. Our mothers told us not to interrupt, but we did it anyway, and the men welcomed the respite of our moppet company, giving us tomatoes, beans, or carrots from a vegetable garden originally planted by Olmsted himself.
It was wartime and we kids chipped in by rolling tin into balls for the effort and pressing yellow and white packets together to make margarine. The fresh tomatoes and beans were a luxury our mothers gratefully accepted.
Germany surrendered in May 1945. Our mothers were tense, praying their men would soon be home. The 5th General Hospital had been sent to Normandy to care for the thousands wounded at Omaha Beach and along the coast of France in 1944. It would be seven more months before Dad performed his last surgery on these brave soldiers and sailed back across the Atlantic.
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