Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The steep trails and wet, slippery terrain of Madagascar's Ranomafana
National Park are hard to negotiate when it rains, which is most of the time.
I was struggling up one wet incline through a stand of giant bamboo when
Roland, my guide, grabbed my arm and pointed upward. There, almost invis-
ible in the thick tangle of bamboo leaves and stems that shielded us from
the sky, were two small brown animals. They peered down from a height of
about fi fteen meters, directly over our heads.
The light around us was green and dim. There was no time to lose—the
animals could soon vanish. I lay down fl at on my back in the mud and aimed
a telephoto lens straight up, much to the distress of my wife who was envi-
sioning all the extra laundry involved. The fl ash, aided by a fresnel lens to
concentrate the light for telephotography, gave me just enough light for a few
pictures before the animals retreated behind a curtain of leaves.
Roland thought that he had spotted golden lemurs. This species, among
the rarest of mammals, was discovered in 1984 by Patricia Wright of New
York State University at Stony Brook. She came across them during an
ultimately successful search for another lemur that had been thought to
close to extinction. There may be a thousand of them left, but fewer are
seen every year.
When I looked at my pictures later, it was clear than we had not seen
golden lemurs at all. Like the animals I had photographed, the golden
lemurs,
Hapalemur aureus
, are marked by soulful dark-rimmed eyes. But
golden lemurs have lighter, yellower faces, and smooth fur. The lemurs that
we had glimpsed had dark faces with light raised eyebrow patches, giving
them a surprised look. They also had a rich, curly brown coat quite unlike
that of any other lemur. Another giveaway was a prominent light stripe run-
ning along their thighs. Instead of the golden lemur we had seen the eastern
woolly lemur,
Avahi laniger
. It turned out that we were lucky even to have
done that, for these lemurs are rare, usually nocturnal, and only occasion-
ally glimpsed during the day.
In the last chapter we saw how the forces that have shaped our planet
have provided plentiful opportunities for new species to evolve. But what
exactly is a species? We have given names to close to one and a quarter million
