My friend Alison Jolly, a renowned primatologist and author, first told me about the angonoka or ploughshare tortoise, which lives in a remote area of northwestern Madagascar known as the Soalala peninsula. It was called the ploughshare (or plowshare) tortoise because part of the lower shell sticks out between the front legs like a plow.
“They are marvelously funny animals,” Alison told me. “The males joust with the long ‘plowshare’ spur on their lower shell that sticks forward under their chins. The goal is to tip one’s rival over on his back. They are big, like soccer balls. The one on his back rocks wildly as he struggles for a foothold to turn over again.” Although for the losing male it is, without doubt, a very undignified situation and not funny at all!
These tortoises live within a six-hundred-square-mile area of bamboo scrub forest and open savanna. Without the dedication of a group of conservationists, it seems almost certain that they would have slipped over the brink into the abyss of extinction. The tortoises were not hunted for food, but irresponsible dealers were taking many for sale to collectors in the international trade in rare species. And the angonoka’s habitat was being overrun with bushpigs, imported from Africa. The local people believe that keeping an angonoka with their chickens will sustain the birds’ health—strangely, people in south Madagascar keep a closely related species, the “radiated tortoises,” with their poultry for the same reason. Maybe there is some truth in it.
In 1986, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust (DWCT) launched Project Angonoka in collaboration with the Malagasy government and with support from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). For more than ten years, this program was headed by Don Reid, whose name will forever be associated with the restoration of the angonoka. I spoke to Don over the telephone, and he told me that when he first arrived at the site he found himself in a small field station, in the middle of a forest, surrounded by villagers who were not only puzzled by what these conservationists were up to but also suspicious of almost everything done by white people. There were a few WWF biologists who occasionally came and went, and although they were near a main road, it was extremely difficult to travel during rainy season. His job—to start a captive breeding program to try to save the angonoka from extinction.