Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  Things that go slither and crawl in the night: panther chameleon, Madagascar tree boa, rot-hole tree frog and leaf-tailed gecko.

  Even Mount Everest is getting crowded. The weather dictates a very narrow window of opportunity, but it’s still shocking to think that more than fifty people sometimes reach the top in a single day.

  If current trends continue, it’s only a matter of time before many of the world’s nature hotspots are completely ruined – if they’re not already.

  So if I had a time-machine and could live on earth during any period in the last four billion years or so, I probably wouldn’t use it. Admittedly, I’d love to sit in a hide and watch Archaeopteryx fluttering about in ancient trees or go cage-diving with a 15-metre (50-foot) megalodon shark in prehistoric seas. But despite a few tourists sunbathing on what was once a wild and deserted beach, I’d rather hang about in the dawn of the 21st century.

  After all, Nosy Mangabé is still bursting with wildlife.

  We couldn’t resist dumping our bags in the sand and exploring straight away. We’d barely stepped into the forest before finding a small troop of white-fronted brown le murs, munching fruit in the treetops; they were so inquisitive it was hard to tell who was supposed to be watching whom. Then with the help of our guide, Paul, we poked around in the tangled undergrowth and found a panther chameleon, two beautifully camouflaged and perfectly motionless leaf-tailed geckos and a Madagascar tree boa a metre (three feet) long.

  Suddenly, it was getting dark and as the sun disappeared below the horizon we heard an unearthly, raucous call straight out of The Blair Witch Project. We stopped and looked at one another.

  A pygmy chameleon – the Holy Grail for chameleon-watchers. It is so small, it’s hardly there.

  ‘That is without a shadow of a doubt a herd of pigs being stabbed to death by an evil Malagasy ghost,’ said a wide-eyed Stephen.

  Paul laughed and motioned towards the other end of the island. ‘Black and white ruffed lemurs,’ he assured us, ‘just settling down for the night.’

  We had a bite to eat, deposited our bags into various tents dotted around the forest, took a swig out of Stephen’s bottle of vodka (never far away when we were camping), grabbed some powerful torches and set off into the night.

  Almost immediately, we found another chameleon: a pygmy chameleon. It wasn’t quite what we had come to Nosy Mangabé to look for, but this is the crème de la crème of chameleons – the Holy Grail for chameleon-watchers.

  ‘Can I hold it?’ asked Stephen. That was usually his first question whenever we got close to any animal smaller than a Border collie. I never found out if the enquiry was a veiled ‘will I hurt it if I hold it?’ or ‘will it hurt me if I hold it?’.

  In this case, I’m sure, it was the former. The pygmy chameleon is one of the smallest chameleons in the world. Small but perfectly formed. ‘Good grief!’ Stephen enthused, as it climbed onto the tip of his forefinger, ‘it’s hardly there it’s so small.’ It was as well made as a proper-sized chameleon, with fused toes, pinhole eyelids, individually rotating eyes and a long curly tail, but was less than half the length of Stephen’s finger.

  He gently put it back among the leaf litter.

  Stephen may be brilliant at many things, but he’s not especially good at keeping quiet. In thick rainforest he tends to stagger and stumble instead of walk, neatly placing his full two-metre (six-foot five-inch) frame onto every snappable twig, and not surprisingly he’s rarely short of a few things to say.

  ‘Okay, Stephen, we need to be as quiet as possible now,’ I whispered.

  ‘Okay,’ came the slightly miffed reply.

  ‘That means no talking.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Not even whispering.’

  Silence.

  We walked deeper into the dark forest.

  ‘AAAGH! WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WAS THAT?’ shouted Stephen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something brushed against my arm.’

  ‘It was probably just a moth. Sshhh.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Stagger, stumble, crack. Mutter, groan.

  ‘Sshhh.’

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. God, this is a nightmare,’ said Stephen, exasperated. ‘It’s impossible to walk quietly through thick jungle. How the hell are we supposed to… OUCH! Shit.’ Slap.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘There was something climbing up my leg.’

  And so it went on.

  We lurched and hacked our way through the jungle, and the dark, shining our torches up into the treetops in the vague hope of seeing a pair of tell-tale eyes staring back, but saw absolutely nothing. To be fair to Stephen, while aye-ayes normally stay well and truly hidden and are notoriously difficult to find, they can also be remarkably bold and fearless and aren’t likely to be all that bothered by a bit of stumbling and slapping. There are even stories of them walking right up to flabbergasted naturalists and sniffing their boots, or strolling nonchalantly through village streets.

  We thought we heard something aye-aye-like at one point (a sort of cree-cree-cree sound and some rustling in the upper canopy), but we couldn’t actually catch sight of anything we could even pretend was an aye-aye. After a few hours we gave up and headed back to camp.

  There was a hedgehog tenrec snuffling about in the grass right outside my tent. Not a hedgehog, but a hedgehog tenrec. This is another Malagasy speciality, which looks spookily like its namesake. Its ancestors were probably the first mammals to arrive in Madagascar, millions of years ago.

  Stephen crept up behind me and I told him what it was. He didn’t believe a word of it.

  ‘No it’s not – it’s a hedgehog,’ he said with the authority of a man who’s spent a bit of time in the jungle. ‘Even I know that.’

  ‘Honestly, it’s a tenrec – it nicked the idea, complete with stiff spines, from true hedgehogs on the mainland.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s probably filling a very similar niche. It’s a great example of convergent evolution.’

  ‘How long did it take scientists to come up with its name?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, why isn’t it called a “fiverec” or a “sevenrec”? How many potential names did they try before they hit upon the perfect “tenrec” do you think?’

  We dumped the torches, grabbed the vodka and headed down to the beach to lie on the sand and stare at the breathtakingly clear night sky.

  Time to contemplate.

  Madagascar had once been a human-free refuge for lemurs and a hotchpotch of other weird and wonderful wildlife off the coast of mainland Africa, and now Nosy Mangabé is a (relatively) human-free refuge off the coast of mainland Madagascar. The main difference is simply that the refuges are getting smaller and smaller. It’s the same in so many parts of the world.

  A British actor and comedian lightly snoring.

  I said something along these lines to Stephen, who was lying on the sand a few metres away, but he didn’t answer. So I lay back and listened to the sounds of the Nosy Mangabé night: white-fronted brown lemurs squabbling in their nocturnal roost, owls calling to one another somewhere in the distant forest across the bay, a motley collection of indistinguishable frogs and insects, and a British actor and comedian lightly snoring.

  When Madagascar decided to slip away from the ancient mega-continent of Gondwana some 160 million years ago, it unwittingly made a good tactical move. (It was still attached to India at the time, but that was a temporary hindrance – the two countries separated about eighty million years later.) The new island, roughly the size of France and escorted by a flotilla of isles and islets, travelled several hundred kilometres east before settling off the coast of Southern Africa. There, while the rest of the world grappled with the emergence of Homo sapiens, it was able to develop completely unscathed. And while all the less fortunate creatures left behind on the African mainland ultimately faced a barrage of competition from the likes of monkeys, lions and woodp
eckers, the inhabitants of Madagascar had the fourth largest island all to themselves.

  Some plants and animals happened to be in the right place at the right time when Madagascar made its escape, and by sheer chance they got away too. In the years since, others have made their own way across the Mozambique Channel, though scientists are still bickering about exactly how they did it. Was there an ancient land bridge that has long since disappeared? Has the sea level changed? Or did they raft across on clumps of floating vegetation that had been washed out to sea from large rivers on the mainland? It sounds like an unlikely film plot, but the general consensus seems to be that the floating vegetation theory is most probably true. It’s known in the scientific world as ‘sweepstake dispersal’.

  Evolution couldn’t have been happier as it set to work on this life raft from a different time. It produced a highly imaginative collection of strange and exotic plants and animals to fill the mini-continent’s rich ecological niches and in no evolutionary time at all successfully produced one of the most unusual and varied assemblages of wildlife anywhere on earth.

  This is what makes Madagascar so thrilling and stimulating (and important) from a wildlife point of view: virtually everything that lives there doesn’t exist anywhere else. In fact, more than eight out of every ten species inhabiting the 1,600-kilometre (1,000-mile) long island is absolutely unique.

  It was shocking to see how little of the rainforest was left. It once clothed Madagascar like a protective coat.

  The African mainland is so close – and yet so far away in evolutionary terms. There are no elephants, no rhinos, no giraffes, no antelopes, no lions or leopards, and no hyenas. And no lots of other things. Madagascar’s wildlife is remarkable for its uniqueness (or endemism, to use the proper term) rather than its diversity.

  If Charles Darwin had stopped off in Madagascar, instead of the Galápagos Islands, he would almost certainly have reached exactly the same conclusions about evolution and the progression of life.

  Visiting this chip off the old Gondwana block is rather like landing on another planet. The plants and animals are vaguely familiar – they resemble monkeys, hedgehogs and civets, for example – yet they are actually lemurs, tenrecs and fanalokas. What’s happened is that in Madagascar evolution has come up with different solutions to the same problems elsewhere in the world.

  The complete absence of people was, of course, a huge advantage. Madagascar had already disappeared over the horizon by the time we started causing havoc almost everywhere else in the world. But the good times came to an abrupt end when people showed up from distant nations skirting the Indian Ocean.

  Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, these people decided to stay.

  They found a wildlife wonderland almost entirely covered in forest. There were gigantic, ostrich-like elephant birds that laid eggs big enough to have fed everyone in a Malagasy village with a double omelette each. They discovered false aardvarks, dwarf hippos and giant lemurs nearly as big as themselves, and a host of other wildlife startlingly different from most of the creatures they had ever encountered before.

  The outcome of this human invasion was perhaps a foregone conclusion. The elephant birds, false aardvarks, dwarf hippos, giant lemurs and many other Malagasy specialities became extinct. Nowadays, they live on only in scientists’ notebooks, museums and Malagasy legend.

  Madagascar is still stuffed full of wildlife goodies, but what’s left is disappearing fast. And the situation is getting worse. In the two decades since Douglas and I arrived to look for aye-ayes, the country’s human population has doubled from roughly ten million to more than twenty million – and that means yet more pressure on the country’s natural resources.

  Worst of all, the forest that once clothed Madagascar like a protective coat is disappearing astonishingly fast, being chopped and burned down to provide more elbow room for agriculture. I remember flying down the east coast with Douglas over an almost continuous swathe of rainforest that stretched as far as the eye could see. Sitting next to Stephen little more than twenty years later, staring out of the window at the same stretch of coast, I could barely believe how little of it was left. Just a few isolated pockets of forest had survived intact.

  It’s not hard to see why Madagascar is now one of the highest conservation priorities on earth.

  Stephen bounded triumphantly into breakfast, looking better than he had done for days.

  ‘I did such a deliciously professional, firm poo this morning,’ he announced to the world in his finest Blackadder voice, ‘I nearly called you to come and have a look!’

  I was exceedingly jealous.

  We’d all had upset stomachs since arriving in Berenty, a three-hour pothole slalom from Fort Dauphin at the extreme southern tip of Madagascar. The cameraman, Sam, was feeling particularly shoddy and was still struggling to divide his time more or less equally between the loo and his camera.

  But Stephen was suddenly back on top form and thoroughly enjoying a return to life in the fast lane. Best of all, he was being text-bombed by the rich and famous with the good news that, while we had been fighting over our limited supply of toilet paper, Barack Obama had won the US Presidential election.

  We finished our banana-and-coffee breakfast, gathered our kit and set off to meet researcher Josia Razafindramanana.

  I felt sorry for her immediately. I have to spell my name to strangers at least three times a day, which I estimate takes about a minute or so. Over the course of a year that’s 365 minutes, or six hours. So far, in fifty years, I’ve lost about 37 working days as a result. Josia Razafindramanana has lost many more, I imagined sympathetically, and she’s considerably younger than me. Normal people don’t take this kind of thing into account.

  Out of interest, her name means ‘granddaughter of somebody rich’. Mine basically means ‘once lived in Cheshire’.

  Josia was forever on the verge of giggling. With the look of a naughty child at the back of the class, trying not to laugh, she was one of those happy, smiley people who raise the spirits of everyone around them. From the moment she clapped eyes on us until the day we said goodbye, she was either giggling or stifling a giggle. I liked her immensely. She positively burst out laughing when we started bickering about who had taken the last Imodium out of the BBC Medical Pack, and was in stitches when we complained about the heat.

  ‘You’re never going to survive midday!’ she howled, wiping the tears from her eyes. ‘It’ll be more than 40°C.’

  Berenty is one of Madagascar’s most-visited reserves. It’s a slightly surreal place, with bright-red sandy roads, white picket fences and the kind of chalets you’d expect to find on Chesil Beach. Located on a bank of the Mandrare River, it is home to natural gallery forest and spiny forest and yet plonked in the middle of a gargantuan sisal plantation.

  Whether you like watching wildlife around white picket fences or not, it’s one of the best places in Madagascar for guaranteed lemur sightings.

  When Douglas Adams and I were there, in 1985, scientists had identified and named a grand total of 21 species of lemur living in Madagascar. It was around that time that interest in Malagasy wildlife really blossomed and, since then, a great many new species have been discovered. The list has more than quadrupled in the years since, with an impressive 88 species known to date, and I’m sure there are more yet to be found.

  We had come to Berenty to see three of them, and first on our ‘wish list’ was Verreaux’s sifaka.

  Goodness knows how you’re supposed to pronounce that. It’s yet more evidence that zoologists really do get drunk before they name new species. Why not call it the black-faced dark-capped silky-furred yellow-eyed lemur, or at least something a little more descriptive and easier to enunciate?

  This red-fronted brown lemur had never seen so many mobile phones.

  A Verreaux’s sifaka dances for the camera.

  To be fair, based on my limited experience, no one in Madagascar can agree on how most words should be pronounced. They
all seem to have several ‘correct’ pronunciations, depending on whom you happen to ask. One problem is the confusion between French, the official language, and English. Take the word ‘Malagasy’, for example. In French, it is pronounced ‘Mal-gash’; but in English, it’s pronounced ‘Mal-er-gassy’. That doesn’t really explain the problem with most animal names, though, which tend to cause the most bewilderment.

  So how about Verreaux’s sifaka? As far as I can tell, the correct way to say it is ‘Verreaux’ as in ‘plateaux’. However, if you believe one of the guides I asked in Berenty, it’s actually ‘very-ers shi-fukka’. The Americans say it is ‘ver-oxy shee-fuk’. And, according to the pilot who flew us from Antananarivo to Fort Dauphin, it should be ‘ver-ows sif-arka’.

  Anyway, the black-faced dark-capped silky-furred yellow-eyed lemur, or VS for short, is famous for dancing.

  We’d been waiting on the edge of the forest, with the temperature rising and our shirts drowning in sweat, for at least a couple of hours. We were hoping to catch a glimpse of a VS leaving the safety of the trees and dancing across the open patch of land in front of us to the forest on the other side.

  But Stephen was huffing and puffing. He looked hot and uncomfortable, and was getting bored. It was understandable, really. As far as he knew, we were waiting for a fairly unremarkable-looking lemur to dash across the clearing and disappear among the trees. He’d rather have had a more leisurely breakfast followed by a gentle morning planning his escape from hot and dusty Berenty, which he didn’t particularly like.