July 20, 2010

I have just returned from my fourth expedition to Madagascar. In all aspects of ease and comfort this trip surpassed my previous expeditions by leaps and bounds. Both myself and my baggage arrived on time, we had a very pleasant stay at La Maison du Pyla, a bed and breakfast run by a wonderful lady named Fanza (or Fanja), and her very energetic seven-year old son, Danny. Danny spent most of his time jumping up and down and making unintelligible noises, or coming up to each of us and saying our name, then asking us to kiss his rather disgusting stuffed animal friend, Dodo (regrettably pronounced Doodoo). We arrived at the beginning of the independence festival. 50 years ago Madagascar gained its independence from France (rather surprisingly there were at least five independence celebrations while I was away: Madagascar, Comoros, Canada, US, and France). We drove in to the city from the airport at about 12:30 am and masses of people were everywhere. There were fireworks and dance parties. Definitely a different atmosphere than the usual Antananarivo after dark. Shawn (my supervisor) and I spent a few days dealing with logistics and walking about the city. This is a lovely time of year to be in Madagascar. It is dry and relatively cool. Nevertheless, there is a lot of pollution and indescribable filth on the streets, and I felt obligated to scrub everything thoroughly after wandering about. We enjoyed some lovely meals at Fanza’s house, including a lunch up on the roof patio overlooking part of the city. It was wonderful. La Maison du Pyla really feels like a home away from home, and it was very nice having some down time in this “home away from home”. I quietly watched the goings on in the house as I sat and read or worked on my computer. Among my favorite daily activities was the scrubbing or polishing of the wooden floor with a half a dried coconut. I have never seen this before and I found it marvelous. One would stand and put one foot on the coconut, and then move the coconut roughly back and forth. This must work because the floor here is smooth and glistening. I was very impressed. We shared the house with a French couple, Gildas and Elaine, and their two adopted Malagasy children. The older child, Emilia, was a bit of a terror. She rarely smiled at me and instead preferred to stick out her tongue, frown, and poke me. However, the younger child, Eme, was probably the cutest kid I have seen in a long time. He was very friendly and still reacted to Malagasy words. Overall, I think that they make a lovely and happy family. I had a lot of respect for their parents. It is not easy to adopt a child in Madagascar.

I spent my 30th birthday in Tana. It didn’t really seem like a birthday, although Fanza did make a delightful and dense chocolate desert, and they sang happy birthday and gave me trick candles to blow out. I definitely appreciated the effort and I would have felt awkward if there had been any additional hullabaloo. Prior to our departure, I had a very intense two-day period of sending out a revised edition for a paper of mine that is in review, and editing proofs for two additional manuscripts. Somewhat miraculously I received proofs for both of my in press book chapters directly before departing for the field. I don’t know what the chances of this happening might be, but they have to be low. I was thrilled to tear through the edits and hope that the papers will be out shortly. IT feels fantastic to know that I am close to NEVER having to deal with these manuscripts ever again.

After a few days in Tana, we met up with our Malagasy student, Lidia, and our Malagasy assistant, Andry, and we all headed North to Ankarafantsika National Park. Ankarafantsika is the largest remaining tract of dry deciduous forest in Northwest Madagascar. It is a big blotch of forest surrounded by regularly burned grasslands. It is easily identifiable via satellite. It’s just SE of Mahajunga and National Route 4 cuts through the middle of the park. The drive to Ankarafantsika was about 1000% easier than the trip to Beza Mahafaly. For starters, the drive is only 1 day instead of 2. Additionally, there is an excellent road the entire way, no dealing with mud pits and potholes that could eat a car. The drive was beautiful too. Central Madagascar is dominated by rolling and very picturesque hills. These same hills lead to some major car-sickness issues, but if you can get past feeling barfy, it’s a really lovely drive.

And Ampijoroa, the research station at Ankarafantsika is really quite amazing. I was completely unprepared for the degree of civilization. Tent platforms had roofs, and we had access to roughly continuous power, and running water with sinks, showers, and flushing toilets. We also had access to two restaurants, which featured tasty treats including cold beer. Getting to the site was a breeze. It was only 10 meters off of the main highway between Antananarivo and Mahajunga. Unfortunately, proximity to the highway also turned out to be the main downside of the research camp. Someone had the bright idea to put a speed bump directly adjacent to the camp. This meant that every car, truck, or zebu cart that came down the road had to slow down to a crawl to go over the hump and then speed up again. As a result, the camp was quite noisy and I really didn’t sleep much during our stay. But that was the only downside.

It was wonderful getting to see a new forest site. My previous experience in Madagascar had been limited to Ranomafana National Park, which is mountainous humid forest, and Beza Mahafaly, which is riparian dry forest and spiny forest. Ankarafantsika boasts dry forest that is unlike either of these places. There are some similar plants and animals, but overall, this place is unique. Embarrassingly, two of my favorite tree species in the park are introduced: Tectonia grandiflora has HUGE leaves and the bark is used to dye raffia brown. Hazomboy (that’s the common name) is called the crocodile tree and the bark is covered in spines. The goal of our research was to conduct some preliminary work examining how much forest fragmentation affects the dry forest. Trees along the forest edges are exposed to hotter temperatures, and drier air than trees growing in the forest interior. Every time forest is cut down or burned, there are more edges, and these edges could be poor habitat for animals like lemurs. Unfortunately both timber harvesting and fire threaten the remaining bits of dry forest in northwestern Madagascar. Every day we hiked out to the forest edge and we collected samples along the savannah forest border. We’ll send the leaf samples back to Canada and then eventually I’ll burn them up and analyze them on a mass spectrometer. Our team included me, Shawn, our student Lidia, our assistant Andry, and Zama, our guide. Zama only wore two shirts during the two weeks we spent at Ampijoroa. The shirt he wore the most was a bright lime green shirt with stars and “Obama” written in cartoonish script. Based on his outfit, we often referred to him as “monsieur le president” and I very much enjoyed greeting him every morning with “Salama Zama Obama”.

We obtained a cook, Mariette, who went shopping and cooked three meals a day for us all for the hefty price of 6,000 Ariary (~$3) per day. Mariette made some incredible food on the little aluminum charcoal “stove” that we purchased for $8. The camp was rather full and we enjoyed catching up with some of the other researchers. Several of the residents were students of Shawn’s. There was also a pair of students studying tenrecs, which are small insectivorous creatures native to Madagascar, and there were a few people studying mouse lemurs, including Sharon Kessler, my old polo teammate from Vassar. It sure is a small world. Unlike us, these people are staying at Ampijoroa for extended periods of time. The tenrec ladies are there for ~2 years! I was very impressed with how settled everyone seemed. The tenrec ladies were especially enterprising. Using a Dutch oven and two gas burners they cooked diverse dinners ranging from bread to shepherd’s pie to delicious deserts. Very impressive.

Although we were officially studying plants, we were obviously also interested in the resident fauna. Among the mammals, we saw a few little Mauritian tomb bats sleeping in a tree and we viewed a number of lemurs including two species of Eulemur, E. fulvus, and E. mongoz, several groups of sifaka, and two species of mouse lemur, M. murinus and M. ravelobensis. We also saw a number of reptiles and amphibians ranging from numerous forest snakes and skinks, to the beautiful gecko that lived by the sink and the little tree frog that resided in or near one of the toilets. I was particularly enamored with “toilet frog”. There was a gecko that lived in the thatched roof above our dinner table and I think it deliberately pooped in the vicinity of my food every single night. Gecko calls sound a lot like laughter, and I could envision the little devil lining himself up above my rice and beans, and then laughing at me.

I also saw several species of endangered tortoise, but that’s just because the Durrell Foundation has a tortoise breeding facility at the park. I very much enjoyed watching all of the little tortoises plod around their respective enclosures and fight over pieces of vegetables. They were especially cute in the morning. They would all line up against the log “fences” between their enclosures and talk their heads and feet into their shells. I was hoping very much to see some crocodiles. Lake Ravelobe, a large, sacred lake, lies directly on the opposite side of National Road 4, ~50 meters from the research camp. There are reportedly 150-300+ crocodiles living in the lake, but I never saw any. Several times I heard one attack a bird. There would be silence, and then a huge commotion and silence again. Perhaps I am glad that I didn’t see any crocs. That gives me something to look forward to next time. Ankarafantsika is a preserve for birds. There are supposed to be 130 species residing in the park. I saw many species and heard even more, but I can only tell you what a handful of them were. I saw kites, drongos, flycatchers, couas, and bee eaters. There were several species of venga, including one of my all time favorite birds, the rufus venga. I can’t tell you what the rufus venga looks like, but I can tell you that it sounds exactly like an alarm clock. “Bee beep, bee beep, bee beep”. We also got to see the endangered Malagasy fish eagle, and I saw several pairs of tiny little love birds that reminded me a lot of Lou. During our stay an Earthwatch team arrived to trap some fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), which are an endangered endemic carnivore resembling a mix between a mongoose and a mountain lion. They are small, sleek, and amazing hunters. They can climb trees and easily leap from one tree to the next. I have seen videos of them but never seen one in the wild. Despite setting abundant traps baited with hunks of beef, Earthwatch did not successfully catch any while I was at Ankarafantsika. The team leader, Dr. Luke Dollar, estimates that there are between 40 and 50 individuals in the entire park. Sadly, the future of the fossa does not look promising.

Our work went quickly and smoothly and we finished early. What an interesting feeling to have a laidback trip with pretty much everything going right. Andry and Lidia helped me weigh and photograph dried soil samples, and I wrote up a preliminary report of our work. Then we had a few days of downtime. Sharon allowed us to release mouse lemurs with her one evening. What fun! The mouse lemurs are trapped in Sherman Live Traps using rotting banana as bait. Apparently the mouse lemurs adore rotting banana. Mouse lemurs are nocturnal, and there are captured during their nighttime foraging. Captured lemurs are taken to camp the following morning where they are weighed, measured, and inspected for parasites. Then each animal is released at the exact same location where it was captured. You might think that this is the most traumatic experience imaginable and worry about the welfare of the mouse lemurs. I certainly was. The majority of mouse lemurs are repeatedly caught over and over again. They appear to think that the reward of a bit of banana outweighs the costs associated with being trapped. The little mouse lemurs are VERY cute and Shawn and I were delighted to get a chance to help release them. Each individual was different. Some hid their heads under their bellies and refused to budge when the trap was opened. Others were hankering to get out and were a blur as soon as the trap was opened. I have put a video of me releasing a shy lemur on you tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxx4IzS8grA).

We also got a chance to do a couple of tourist hikes. The first hike was to a “canyon” at the southwest edge of the park. The weather was surprisingly copasetic. There was a cool wind and cloud cover. Without these two factors the hike to the canyon would have been decidedly less pleasant. The canyon is definitely beautiful, but it is quite obviously a terrible erosional feature. I was rather disappointed in the park for advertising it as a natural feature. It might be the best example I have ever seen of what can happen when you have some loose sediments, and seasonal torrential rains. Somewhere in the past few hundred years, an old cattle trail began to erode and now there is a huge, colorful gash that grows steadily every year. Standing on the edge of the canyon made me nervous. The soil is almost 100% sand and it is very unconsolidated. I couldn’t help wondering how many cows fall into the canyon every year.

We also went on a tour around Lake Ravelobe. The tour included some boardwalk bridging marshes, a close up encounter with four massive baobabs, and a lovely meandering path underneath the very tall trees bordering the lake. I had hoped to see some crocodiles on this hike but it wasn’t meant to be. I did, however, get to see some ant lions. Keri, one of the tenrec ladies, showed me how to catch an ant lion. I have, somewhat embarrassingly, always been somewhat afraid of these strange little subterranean creatures that build funnels and eat ants. I am no longer afraid. They ARE very bizarre looking, but they appear to be completely harmless to humans. Thank you Keri.

Before departing northwest Madagascar, we took a day trip to the city of Mahajunga (a.k.a. Majunga). Mahajunga is a hot and humid town on the sea. The city is bright and relatively clean and it reminded me a lot of Tulear, which is farther south. The air felt thick and salty, and the sun was very bright. We had to go to the Eaux et Forets (forests and water) office to get our research permits stamped, and then we decided to get some pizza and ice cream, which is a very special treat in Madagascar. I also had a mission to find a strange but incredibly functional piece of clothing called a lambawani. It’s like a big tube of colored cloth that you can tie around yourself in several different fashions. I successfully found exactly what I was looking for (thanks to Lidia) and I felt very pleased.

And just like that, it was time to return to Antananarivo, where I was finally able to get a full night’s rest. On the way back we got to stop at the bridge crossing the Betsiboky, one of the most impressive rivers I have seen. In the dry season, the river is divided into numerous small rivulets, each sporting its own rapids and waterfalls. The rock dividing the rivulets is hard metamorphic gneiss and there are plentiful round potholes dotting the rock face. In the rainy season, the entire valley must be a raging torrent. The bridge spanning the river is mighty, and it was thrilling walking along it as taxi brousses and large trucks zipped passed.

Shawn and I had dearly hoped that we would be able to return to Canada early. Everything had gone so well. We had finished our work a week early and we were ready to return home. We had a frustrating day of not being able to log on to the Air France website, and visiting the Air France office in Tana where we were told no seats were available on an earlier flight. Then Shawn discovered that there were, in fact, lots of seats available, but neither of us could change our seats online. We went back to the ticket office and were told, once again, that no tickets were available. After a polite 10 minutes of suggesting that maybe there were tickets, lo and behold, the agent found tickets and we got to leave Madagascar 5 days early. Joy! I spent the final two days in the city working on some of my lectures for my upcoming class (I got a lecture position with the department of anthropology starting in the fall), and sleeping off a cold that no doubt had something to do with the pollution in Tana. We had a celebratory dinner at a surprisingly tasty Thai restaurant, and then we bided our time waiting for our flight that left at 2:30 am. I was unbelievably lucky to land a seat in an empty row on the flight from Tana to Paris and I spent the first 6 hours of my 24-hour trip sleeping laying down. My second flight from Paris to Toronto was less comfortable, but I still managed to get a lucky seat. I was asked to switch with a deaf lady who wanted to sit with her family, and the switch took me to an exit row with LOTS of legroom. Wonderful.

All my bags made it back from Madagascar and I zipped myself off into a cab and surprised Matt by showing up at our door five days early. What a fun surprise. It felt great! Now I am back in Toronto being a busy little bee and trying to get everything I need to accomplished before the fall. It’s good to be home.

I hope that summer is treating you well.

Brooke