Past the long uphill stretch, we entered a more level, heavily forested area.
This area was home to a wide variety of life, including the small group of brown
lemurs seen here.August 8, continued
That afternoon, we went to load the fossa traps in Jardin Botanical A, one of the two areas of Ankarafantsika National Park we were using for the study. The traps have to be loaded with live chickens, as fossas will not eat anything dead. This meant carrying live chickens into JBA, up a long hill on a trail of soft sand. This was, of course, a huge pain in the butt.
Past the long uphill stretch, we entered a more level, heavily forested area.
This area was home to a wide variety of life, including the small group of brown
lemurs seen here.
JBA was also being used by the German researchers, and their mouse lemur traps were visible on many trees in the area. They were narrow metal boxes about eight or nine inches long. We did briefly sight a mouse lemur one night, and they're aptly named; tiny, about rodent-sized, and very fast.
The paths in this part of JBA were many, and this walk was largely about orienting us and teaching us the correct routes along the sandy trails. We also learned about which birds we should be on the lookout for, as cataloging them was part of our job. Surprisingly, the birds of this region of Madagascar were very unphotogenic.
Coming out of the forest,
we came to a large open area, which in that part of Madagascar generally means
ex-forest. Here we saw the first clear sign of ecological decay, apart from
all the missing trees, that is.
This is a lavaka, a Malagasy word meaning "hole". Lavakas form where the trees have been cut down and the groundwater is depleted. Without the trees to hold the topsoil in place, erosion sets in, and the ground can collapse into this.
This particular lavaka was home to a pair of kestrels and a peregrine falcon. For a while I stood and watched one of the kestrels riding the late-afternoon thermals, looking for all the world as though it was surfing on thin air. Quite beautiful, though too distant to photograph.
Behind the lavaka, a short walk away, was the tower we used for radio telemetry. We reached it just about sunset.
This was as far out as we
went; from here we turned back towards the forest, to return to camp via a different
route.
Along the way, we saw this wooly lemur peering down at us from a tree. He seemed entirely unafraid of us, though that could have been because he was safely fifteen feet over our heads. Even our multiple camera flashes didn't spook him.
After our exhausting hike, we drove into Andranofasika for a meal at a small restaurant there. Conversation was less lively than one might expect, as everyone was dead tired. Nobody sat awake reading that evening, we got horizontal and were stone unconscious.