Word: madagascar
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When you're on the lookout for lemurs - the unusually cute and endangered group of primates found only on the African island of Madagascar - it helps to have good eyes (lemurs are small), sharp ears (they rustle the trees) and a keen nose (they have an unmistakable smell...
...walking through the Réserve Spéciale d'Analamazaotra, a few hours' drive west of Madagascar's capital of Antananarivo. The reserve is one of the few remaining patches of untouched forest on Madagascar, where more than 90% of the native tree cover has already been lost; chameleons, rare frogs and lemurs make their home here. It's late afternoon, and patches of early spring sunlight (this is the Southern Hemisphere) peek through the Ravenea louvelii, the native palm. Lemurs are sleeping this time of day, though, and a sleeping lemur is hard to spot. But then...
...hard to say how long the indri itself will stay with us. Madagascar's native plants and animals evolved in isolation for some 80 million years; as a result, the 587,000-sq-km country, which sits just off the coast of southeastern Africa, has perhaps the highest level of biodiversity per capita in the world. It's what conservationists call a "hotspot" - one of about 25 places on Earth that have suffered massive habitat loss and account for less than 2% of the planet's land surface, but are home to about half the world's plant species...
That's why Mittermeier and I are here, to see Madagascar's wildlife while we can, and to see what's being done to save it. After a day in Antananarivo - a sprawling, diesel-soaked city that earns the adjective "teeming" - we leave by car for Andasibe, a former logging village that is now home to a burgeoning ecotourism trade. On the winding road we see the result of centuries of tavy, traditional slash-and-burn agriculture. The verdant forests that once covered much of Madagascar have been burnt or torn down, replaced by muddy rice paddies and secondary shrubs...
...Track 4: Madagascar This is that crappy song the band played when I was at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards and they sucked and he was fat and out of breath and I kept saying I was pretty sure it was a fake Axl Rose. It's Axl's attempt to do Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. It's vaguely Middle Eastern and slow and bombastic and a little trippy. But it's boring. And why does it end with all those clips of Martin Luther King Jr.? Grade...