TWELVE
Golden bamboo lemurs of Ranomafana
Ranomafana lies on a narrow neck of eastern rainforest bisected by the main road that runs from the city of Fianarantsoa, high on the central plateau, all the way down to the coast. In its forest lives a red bamboo-chomping lemur with surprised golden eyebrows. Its discoverers didn’t even know what it was.
In 1986 Patricia Wright of Duke University Primate Center attempted what seemed like a wild goose chase up and down the tracks of the eastern escarpment, brandishing a nineteenth-century color plate of a bright red animal labeled Hapalemur simus, the greater bamboo lemur. She asked all along the way if anyone had seen this possibly extinct animal?
Jean-Jacques Petter, Georges Peyrieras and Georges Randrianasolo actually found a few greater bamboo lemurs ten years before, in the small sacred forest of Kianjavato, a long way downhill from Ranomafana. Pat had never seen those animals, which did not look much like her picture. Russ Mittermeier’s Primate Action Fund (supported by gracious Margot Marsh, who had fed dinner at her home to the Napoleon tour), gave Pat a tiny $5,000 to hunt the elusive H. simus. Russ remarked later, ‘Best investment I ever made!4
After Pat searched in vain up and down and round the escarpment, on perilous tracks, bird guides Loret and Émile from Ranomafana said, ‘Oh yes, if you cross the loggers’ bridge over the Namorona River waterfall, there you find those red bamboo lemurs.’
Almost simultaneously, Bernhard Meier from Germany also crossed that bridge to start a long-term study. Rumors swirled: someone had rediscovered greater bamboo lemurs— except that these were red.
So, after the Alton Jones’s trip, Russ Mittermeier and I absolutely had to travel to Ranomafana. Perhaps we could glimpse the mysterious new creature.
To clear up the confusion, there turn out to be three different bamboo lemurs. Common small gray ones, the Hapalemur griseus species group, nibble many kinds of bamboo leaves and reeds and occasionally people’s paddy rice. The red form, called golden bamboo lemurs, Hapalemur aureus, feed mainly on cyanide-laced growing shoots of giant bamboo. The even rarer grey greater bamboo lemur, Prolemur simus, shreds the tough bases of giant bamboo into something like a fistful of dry spaghetti. The little red animals inspired the creation of one of Madagascar’s most famous national parks, but in 1986 we couldn’t foresee that.5
The big question was which scientist had a right to be there, and who had the right to claim discovery.
November, 1986. Russ and I arrived in Ranomafana to call on Bernhard Meier.
We commandeered Loret Rasabo, a young guide with sleepy eyes, to show us the way to Bernhard’s house. We picked up Loret at his village, Ambatolahy, ‘The Village of the Male-Stone,’ which consists of twenty mud houses. A row of tree-ferns sculpted into flower pots lined the road in hope of sales; it’s a wonder there are any tree-ferns left. A path went down—not quite straight down, maybe not even a 45-degree angle—to the Namarona river. There are only three places in about 30 kilometers where you can cross the Namorona’s waterfalls and rapids as it cascades down the escarpment. The loggers’ bridge was just three long trunks over the waterfall, with flat board steps. No need for handrails, why bother? Just don’t look down. If you fell, you’d surface several kilometers downstream—or not at all. I have no sense of balance, and can boast of falling off log bridges into streams on every continent except Antarctica. Over the Namorona sheer terror kept me upright to the far bank.
Uphill on the other side, like a very steep staircase. Then down. Then up. Later, Bernhard swore his house is only 840 meters from the river. Distances just feel longer in the tangle of forest. His house is an open lean-to with a view out over a little valley of bamboo. High forest rises on the slope beyond. Neat shelves, neat plastic sheets under the travellers’ palm frond roof, gear neatly stored in rubber bags. We’d heard so much good and so much bad of our host! He was sent out here to catch lemurs for Yves Rumpler’s lab in Strasbourg. A house can tell you its maker is efficient, artistic and poor. But not if he is good or bad in the ethics of conservation … and there was no Bernhard.
Right—we’d see the forest. An afternoon of sun in rainforest isn’t for wasting. Loret took us up a ridge, and down, and up the next ridge, and down. ‘Ah—oh’ he called. A voice answered—Rajerison Émile (called Rajery) stood in the woods, in blue wool pullover and red-and-green tartan cap. He was taking notes on a troop of red-bellied lemurs he’d been following all day. A troop of two, just the male and female. No, not the tame ones by the house—these were an unprovisioned group with a 10 hectare territory. Meanwhile Bernhard was following another study group for comparison, ones with a 100+ hectare range. Who was this Bernhard who could get village guides to do all-day-follows on their own?
We traipsed back, up down, up down to the stick house. No Bernhard. His cook was bubbling something over the fire-stones—apparently a whole neighborhood came to the stick house? A cook and three guides? But where was the host? Russ was already using his flashlight to see the trail as we approached. I didn’t because I see trails better in half-light.
Should we start back to the road or wait? I opted for going while there was still a little twilight. But twilight doesn’t last long in the tropics—after the first uphill from camp I switched on my light too—I’d only brought son Dickon’s tiny ‘bedside’ one because this was just supposed to be a brief social call in daylight to meet Bernhard Meier.
Of course you always imagine what you’d do if lost in a forest like that. I lagged way behind the others, at intervals anyhow. I made up my mind back in the Nilgiri Hills in 1979 that the only comfortable way to travel with Russ Mittermeier is let him walk at his pace and me at mine, and catch up an hour or so later. So I amused myself thinking: if lost, I might have to spend the night, but even the rain isn’t cold and there are no dangerous animals…
Then Loret put his hand on a scorpion. Only time I’ve heard a Malagasy say, when asked, Ça va? Non, ça ne va pas. The beast was on a tree trunk just the height you grab for support. Loret was stung on the little finger, but the poison filled the heel of his hand, then worked rapidly toward the elbow. Russ, who always has everything, dosed Loret with Bufferin from his pack. No, it isn’t fatal, or even really paralyzing; just like being stung by a whole colony of wasps. Russ claimed the Bufferin was strong, strong painkiller, and Loret felt better.
There was no help for putting hands on tree trunks. I’ve always progressed in steep woods with my hands, to move at all, like an orang-utan. So I lagged way behind again.
At which point Dickon’s light went out. The batteries died suddenly. I hadn’t imagined a night in the woods without light, unable even to see my feet. The others had reached the cascading river already and couldn’t hear me shouting. I stood where I was and waited till finally Russ got worried and came back. It turns out he travels with four flashlights. This is the difference between a background in the Amazon and one in Madagascar.
There was another light, and a brief glimpse of flash-lit face, a sweet smile and brown beard. Bernhard, returning from his all-day-follow! Guten Tag! Wilkommen! Wie geht’s? Would you come to dinner at the hotel with us? Zehr gern! Und bleiben zie zu Hause mit Mir!
Dinner in the Hotel Thermale of Ranomafana, which is Malagasy for hot water. Natural warm sulfur springs bubble into bathtubs in the nearby Bains Thermale; the little hotel is a relict of Frenchmen seeking the health cure. Over the regulation stack of plates involved in a Franco-Malagasy meal we sat trying to figure each other out. Fortunately for me the dinner conversation veered only between French, German and English, sentence by sentence, without having to follow Russ in Portuguese, Spanish or Sranan-Tongo. Bernhard did laugh at Russ’s German, which had the phrases of a 7-year-old brought up in a German-speaking family.
Bernhard did a lovely double-take when he finally realized my name. He has Lemur Behavior on the bookshelf in the stick house, and said he’d thought I was about 60. He was so grateful that the Russ Mittermeier and the Alison Jolly had come to visit him. (I began to feel about 60.) He spilled over with eagerness and excitement. He talked about the red bamboo lemur, gene pools and restricted reserves and patchy distributions. He talked about the only five spots with giant bamboo in all the forest he had surveyed, and how the red bamboo lemurs ate almost nothing but giant bamboo, though nibbling at a few other species, so their distribution was patchiest of all. His thesis had been the collection, founding and genetic analysis of a breeding colony of slender loris from Sri Lanka. He has, in short, exactly the theoretical background needed to bridge from the problems of managing small zoo populations to the problems of managing wild populations that will, in the end, be very small.6
Then he spoke of the Perlekette—the chapelet of pearls. Madagascar’s eastern forest needs not one reserve, or two, or three. It needs a reserve system—protected areas not islanded but strung together by the forested escarpment like pearls on a string. There’s a theme for a book.
In short, the untrustworthy animal-catcher seemed to be a trustworthy, idealistic, hard-done-by student. We finally found the answer to Bernhard’s contradictions. If he’d thought I was 60, I thought he was 26, so wistful and excited… He’s 36 instead, a ten-year teacher of high-school biology, used to managing budgets for German nature reserves. His confidence with the guides, with radio tracking and data collection, and even the way he got his house built, is the confidence of a man only one year younger than Russ and an authoritative Teuton to boot. He was sent out to Ranomafana by the scientific community and then essentially abandoned alone in the woods—a 36-year-old Hansel with no Gretel—but maybe he is more manicdepressive than that… In the meantime, Russ had started right in calling him du, whether because of student status or forest comradeship or just because Russ’s German dates from his own childhood. I followed suit, not to be stiff and awkward. We both hiccuped a moment after Bernhard told us his age, then settled back to du.
Meanwhile I grinned at the searchlight of Russ’s charm turned on to a vulnerable younger man. I’ve seen so many women dithering over how quickly to succumb. Insulated by my ten years’ seniority and by my blatant monogamy, I have the delight of travelling with Russ and being real friends.
When Bernhard first arrived he came straight from the airport to Ranomafana. Then he went back and then spent ten whole days liberating his camping and scientific gear and schlepping it by truck back to his study site. He found Patricia Wright of Duke installed in his campsite, having hired his guides, and having found the red bamboo lemurs. Patricia did see them first, unless you count Loret of the sleepy eyes and Rajery in his tartan cap, who showed all the scientists where to look.
Bernhard, by his account, rushed up with open arms, hoping to join the Duke party. Patricia was sharply suspicious of this unknown German sent out to catch lemurs. And the suspicions have ricocheted round the world ever since.
A mother red bamboo lemur sat in a tree crotch, holding the tip of a giant bamboo spike like a dwarfed drum majorette. She’d chewed it off so the piece she held was perhaps 3 inches in diameter, and three times as long as her body. She addressed it like corn on the cob, sinking in upper canines (lemurs have rudimentary upper incisors), and stripping fibers loose with a ripping noise. Then she and her half-grown son settled to crunching the exposed undercoat. Rip, rip, rip, crunch, crunch, crunch.
They don’t eat like lemurs, and they don’t move like leaf eaters. Indriids loll among the branches, languidly stretching out a hand to nibble a leaf-tip like furry Madame Récamiers. The bamboo lemur was in a hurry, grabbing and gobbling, while the juvenile male bounded about like Russ fighting to set up his tripod on the steep slope. We all decided that bamboo shoots must be high-sugar food—the primate equivalent of Coke and chocolate bars.
Russ and I flashed away at mother and baby while the drizzle turned slowly to thunder and lightening. We did have a patch of sun later. Bernhard led us up and down another ridge to high pristine jungle—big trees, apparently never touched by loggers, that met over a little granitebouldered stream. There was another stand of giant bamboo. Once you know the signs, you can always track bamboo lemurs: the bamboo top spears are gone, so the stems leaf out at the sides in little tufts. Some stems were full of great holes near the base—inconceivable that a primate can chew holes like a beaver, nipping through woody stems 6 inches in diameter. Giant bamboo grows to 30 meters tall. It is just one endemic species. Bamboo lemurs spurn the introduced Chinese bamboos. Their diet, and distribution, seem to be tied to a single plant.7
But the mystery of bamboo lemurs remains. I saw lemurs of both the first and second round. The ones Petter and Peyrieras and Randrianasolo caught from the Kianjavato coffee station in 1972 (halfway down the road toward the coast) were dirty yellowish grey, with tufty ears, very different from Patricia and Bernhard’s glowing red ones with the creamy-gold chipmunk cheeks. I wonder how different these red ones are?
For decades almost all the forest that drops down from Ranomafana to Kianjavato has been cleared. There’s a fascinating suggestion that both lemurs and bamboo came originally from lower forest, in the land now bare. The president of Loret’s village says all the giant bamboo within the remaining forest was planted by people, in patches near long-abandoned villages! And now even the remains, the top step of the escarpment, are under threat. Bernhard walked Russ all over the adjacent mountain to show him cleared tavy fields hacked out of the bamboo, and me round to see a ‘road’ where a local contractor, Paul Rarijaona, wants to bring chain saws and tractors to scrape the hills bare. We may be able to stop him—these hills are the watersheds of the Namorona river. The Namorona’s famous cascades provide electricity for the towns of Manakara, Manajara and half Fianarantsoa. Rarijaona is a true villain— surely no Eaux et Forêts man would have given him the permit to fell these particular slopes out of mere stupidity. Money has changed hands somewhere, to let Rarijaona make a profit off the electricity company watershed, which now happens to be the only known home of the red bamboo lemur.
When we finally went to bed in the stick house, one final, unnoticed leech dropped off the crook of my elbow like a ripe grape. The others found some too; they didn’t say where but sounded upset.
I lie in my down bag, on my magic self-inflating mat, looking through the house slats to rainforest leaves. Sunlight already. Wriggle erect enough to look round the partition and see a recumbent khaki lump under the working shelf, so Bernhard is still asleep too. No noise but coua calls and forest frogs and snores, which implies that Russ and the guides and the cook are also asleep in the other part of Bernhard’s stick lean-to house, around the fire-stones. Russ has greatly increased the floor space in the ‘living room’ by slinging his Amazonian hammock from the house poles, which lets the guides extend underneath him.
No point in getting up!
I protest I’m not asleep when a fruity and familiar voice booms ‘You lazy bastards! In bed at 7 a.m.! Oh, hullo Alison—I might have known you’d be wearing an upmarket nightgown even in these circumstances!’ (Richard’s Sudanese caftan).
Quentin Bloxam, the big herp curator from Jersey, blows into the house, followed by small, blond, tanned Lucienne Wilmé. I hadn’t really registered her before, thinking of her as bird-man Olivier Langrand’s spiky-haired girlfriend. It turns out she’s a long-term birdwatcher on her own account. She knows the trails round Ranomafana as well as anyone. It was she and photographer Dominique Halleux who first trained Loret and Rajery.
‘All right,’ booms Quentin, ‘where’s breakfast? And bring on the lemurs!’
So, on cue red-bellied lemurs come and pose right on the stick terrace of Bernhard’s stick house! The male, shyer, with his nose so black and his teardrops of white by the eyes so white they’re together a real face mask. The female, and the ‘baby male,’ a juvenile already on his own, are round and red and fuzzy and apparently cuddle-able. The baby male’s cream teardrops are just starting. The female sports a few cream-colored spots on the bridge of her nose like freckles. She’s much sassier, like all lemur females. She eats from your hand and leads her male all round the forest, he marking branches after her with the top of his head. They’re apparently always monogamous, and the young may leave before the next birth season—any day now. No wonder the female is so round.
Everyone whips out their cameras, again… Quentin admits he is even growing to like mammals as much as herps, as though this were a sentimental weakness of age… The red-bellied lemurs unsentimentally gobble banana slices.
We kit out with enough lens-power for a small observatory, hung round us in belts and vests and knapsacks. Lucienne Wilmé adds a variant—a Sony field recorder for bird calls, while Loret shoulders a meter-wide parabolic microphone that makes him look like a space invader. Then we clump off down the trail.
Up and down and up to the second ridge, where Rajery calls ‘Ah-oh’ and points upward.
Seven diademed sifaka loll in the sun. Seven and a baby. The baby is perhaps three months old, past the stringy, jughead stage of new sifaka, and now a perfect teddy bear. It bounces on its mother, and hop-kicks its way up the branch and scrambles back and plays with her tail and starts all over again, while she absent-mindedly gives him a few strokes of her tooth-comb when she can slow him down. The seven are arranged on two white branches, forks of a dead tree in front of blue sky. The mother and two friends groom on one branch, four more on the other. These are Milne-Edwards’ subspecies, very different from the grey-and orange diademed sifaka of Perinet. Their chocolate fur gleams rich as Malagasy rosewood, their backs are sunlit cream-white against the gray-lichen white of the tree.8
One of the mother’s friends leaps over to the group on the opposite branch. The second follows, and the mother, so the tree branch blossoms with an intricate tangle of seven lots of arms and legs and poking muzzles. Then the baby jumps over too, on top of the heap. The last straw.
The branch breaks. Sifaka rain down all over the place like tumbling acrobats. Some catch themselves on low trees, some hit ground with a thump and bounce back at once to stems a meter off the ground. The baby hits about 10 feet from us, then clings to a vertical stem, looking about.
As usual with sifaka, no sound—not even the baby gives the bubbly coo of contact, though its mother comes toward it and it hops rapidly to her back. The others just sit looking dazed…
And so do we. Not one of us had the presence of mind to take a picture as they fell, for all the massed telephoto power aimed at them sunning!
So endeth the story of the enchanted forest of Ranomafana. There will be sequels. Will Patricia and Bernhard and Russ save the forest from the evil exploiter? Will Rajery and Loret, meanwhile, remain true to the salary Russ is offering them, and save those trusting lemurs from being eaten while Bernhard goes back to Germany to write his thesis?
I suspect the next chapter gets written in Washington. The main characters will be the smooth, smooth minister of Eaux et Forêts, and pompous trustees of WWF, with Russ and me disguised in the background in necktie and nylons.9
And some time we’ll all foregather at Ranomafana, all who can, and the ones who were there this time will point out to others, with parental pride, the young red bamboo lemur which learned how to eat giant bamboo, and the baby sifaka whose weight was the last straw that broke the branch on the day the diadems fell down.
4. Russ Mittermeier to Alison Jolly, email, January 20, 2014.
5. Hapalemur griseus is now reclassified as five separate species living in different parts of Madagascar, but all closely related.
6. A. Jolly, Lemur Behavior (1966).
7. Cephalostachyum vigueri.
8. Now a full species: Milne-Edward’s sifaka, Propithecus edwardsii.