Little Cousin of the Trees

The stars had beaten back the clouds when Gene called my attention to something glowing in the forest. I looked up at where he stood by the tent, temporarily blinding him with my headlamp.

“It looked like eyes,” he said.

I swiveled back to the wall of leaves, searching.

“Eyes?” I responded, a bit skeptical, but already crashing my way towards the spot he pointed at.

My light could only silhouette the interlocking leaves in white.

“Maybe it was the glint of a frog,” I began, and then stopped dead in my tracks.

There, among the branches, two shining gold coins. I stepped a foot closer, and the tiny lights winked away into the darkness beyond the campsite.

“I saw something too,” I reported back to Gene, only to find that our guides were one step ahead of us, leading the way into the valley for a nocturnal tour.

I scrambled down the path in pursuit. At night, the forest seemed vast. Ankafobe, the slice of forest that we were walking through, is no more than a valley and a half in size. But with the lichen laden trees clutching close to the path in the night, Ankafobe felt infinite. Our guide, Endry, explained what we were looking for. Mouse lemurs.

Posing in the forest of Ankafobe

Mouse lemurs are the smallest primates in the world. A quick google search will bring up an image of former basketball player Shaquille O’Neal holding one in his hand: the teensy lemur’s head is the size of Shaq’s thumb. A mouse lemur brain weighs about the same as a paperclip. Like most of Madagascar’s wildlife, they are found nowhere else in the world, and they are threatened by habitat loss.

I had expected to see lemurs when I came to Madagascar, but not mouse lemurs, who are not only nocturnal but much shyer than some of their daytime relatives. I hadn’t even seen them at the zoo, where as you may recall, the nocturnal exhibit was closed due to complete mouse lemur anarchic takeover. So, it was with a bit of doubt that I stumbled along the path behind Endry, my headlamp pointed towards the canopy. We crossed the creek, followed by the gentle gurgle that sustains Ankafobe’s dry-season proof forest.

I began to lose track of distance, as all the trees looked the same at night, and I couldn’t be sure how fast we were walking. I reminded myself that there was only one path in and out of the forest. And surely, we wouldn’t be walking too much farther. Endry, per usual, was one step ahead.

“Maybe not tonight,” He conceded, shooting one last beam of light into the tips of the trees.

I nodded, disappointed, but not totally let down. After all, night walks in most Madagascar parks are forbidden for safety reasons, so even getting out and about felt like a treat.

The sound of the creek had found us again when Endry stopped abruptly. Without a word he dialed his headlamp to narrow the beam. High in the canopy, two lights shone back at us. I stared breathless, and let my vision adjust. There, clutching a twig above us was our most distant cousin. From a distance, the mouse lemur’s eyes seemed larger than its body. An animal so impossibly adorable, that it would have been more plausible to see in a Pixar movie.

We watched the eyes glimmer in silence, until the mouse lemur was finished looking. In the blink of an eye (and thank goodness I didn’t blink) it launched itself from the branch and into the darkness. A chill went up my spine. The jump had the same fluidity as the languid swing of a chimpanzee. And yet! I could have cupped the lemur in my hand. I felt, in that moment, the full gravity of evolution. 60 million years of ever-branching life bundled up in one graceful leap.

Groggy chameleon

We continued our walk back in whispered excitement, and although we didn’t find any more mouse lemurs, we were gifted a tiny chameleon curled up on a branch. Groggily, she opened her swiveling eye and gave us a harsh stare, before deciding we weren’t enough trouble for her to move branches. It was bedtime for all diurnal creatures, and I was happy to crash onto my leaky thermarest back at camp and leave the mouse lemurs to their nighttime routine.

The next day we collected botany data, leaving time for some expeditions up the creek in search of frogs. Even though collecting plants is probably on my list of least favorite environmental studies pursuits (down there with memorizing nutrient cycles and pulling wild parsnip) I was thankful to spend time in the fresh air out of the city. Not to mention that we were accompanied by five Malagasy students, so I finally was able to make some more friends my age.

Collecting specimens with Tex and Fidel

We all laughed over the land-leeches preference for Gene’s blood. Gene insisted it was because he is mamy be or “very sweet”, a line which garnered mixed results. I will give Gene credit for being the best out of all of us at Malagasy; he practices relentlessly with his host dad Rivo and has the sentences to show for it. Sometimes though, people here like to practice their English, such as Rivo’s nephew, coincidentally named Mamy.

This weekend Mamy and his buddy, who are both around our age, came over to hang out with Gene and me. Their English is excellent, given that they’ve both been studying for just a few months. They had one thing on their mind.

“Let’s go to KFC and take pictures,” Mamy suggested.

Gene and I shared a look and then instantly agreed. We had seen the large KFC from a distance before and were curious: it’s the sole American fast-food representative in the country. After an hour and a half in weekend traffic, we arrived at what might as well have been a crash-landed American spaceship.

The KFC bucket, with informal housing visible over the wall

The only difference between the Antananarivo KFC and an American one was the currency on the menu. It took me a minute to notice that it was cool, too. They had air conditioning, something I hadn’t felt since my first few nights at the hotel. For the price (twice that of a local restaurant) the food was nowhere near worth it, but Mamy and his friend got a kick out of the novelty of it.

I began to feel unsettled. The place was nearly empty, and it was by far the nicest building I had been in all month. Comfortable seating, wifi, AC. But the security at the door dissuaded non-customers. This, I thought, is the American dream packaged up and delivered to any region of the world. A place where the lights are always on, and the dishes are sterilized at 160 degrees fehrenheit.

But the food, notably, is pretty damn average. And nowhere, in the fluorescent light KFCpocolypse that is the US, will you look up into the stars and find two of them blinking right back at you.

View of Ankafobe