Papango sy goaika

Papango sy goaika

18^th October

New today between Antsirabe and Ranomafana

	Mammals
86	brown (rufous) mouse lemur	Microcebus rufus
	Birds
880	souimanga sunbird	Nectarinia souimanga
881	pied crow	Corvus albus
882	Madagascar stonechat	Saxicola sibilla
883	crested drongo	Dicrurus forficatus
884	Madagascar bulbul	Hypsipetes madagascariensis
	Reptiles
22	blue-legged chameleon	Calumma crypticum
23	O’Shaughnessy’s chameleon	Calumma oshaughnessyi
24	lined day gecko	Phelsuma lineata bifasciata
25	nose-horned chameleon	Calumma nasuta
	Amphibians
9		Ptychadena mascareniensis
10		Heterixalus alboguttatus
11		Boophis madagascariensis
12		Heterixalus betsileo

2012 Totals

Mammals: 86

Birds: 884

Reptiles: 25

Amphibians: 12

Fish: 11

Long days, happy days

It's almost eleven at night and I've been working since five this morning. Since I wrote from Antsirabe I haven't had ten free minutes in which to write. We've seen tons of astounding creatures and delighted in the delirious beauty of Madagascar's forests. However, I have to be up at five tomorrow and I'm tired; so lists of vertebrate additions to my list will have to do for now.

More when there's time.

Alefa!

 17^th October

I love Madagascar. I thought I’d better get that straight from the start as I’m planning to wax lyrical for the next few weeks. I mean, seriously, it’s got everything a right-thinking naturalist could want. It’s got dozens of endemic primates (exact number unsure as some haven’t yet been named and – see yesterday’s post for details of my fascinating conversation with Steve Goodman – it turns out from recent genetic studies that many of those already described aren’t in fact species). What’s more it’s got lots of jazzy birds that do funky things. Like funky? Well look no further than the chameleons. Chameleons are way funky and if you dig chameleons Madagascar is definitely going to be your thang.

And did I mention the endemic family of carnivores, the three endemic subfamilies of insectivore, the fifty species of bat (many of them recently discovered by the aforementioned Steve Goodman and eighty per cent of them endemic) and the fact that two genera of hippos arrived separately across the ocean and lived here successfully until people tipped up around 2,300 years ago and ate them all?

And the whales? Yup, Madagascar has whales too.

So read on people: this Madagascar adventure is gonna be worth the entry fee.

Today’s first Madagascan addition to my list was exactly what I thought it would be: a flock of greenish reddish loudly chipping Madagascan fodies at breakfast. A Madagascar hoopoe put in an appearance too and I reflected over fruit salad what a marvellous place this is.

Our first visit was to a lake in the centre of the city, called Tsarasoatra. I liked Tsarasoatra when I first visited it last year and today I really liked it. There are crazy numbers of ducks here. Most of them are vociferous white-faced whistling ducks and quiet red-billed teal. Here and there are dinky hottentot teal and hunkering in the shade are a few comb ducks. (People who come to comb ducks from a background in African birding are likely to want to call these knob-billed ducks. There’s no accounting for taste.) In the middle of all this duckage there is an island whose papyrus beds are throbbing with breeding herons. Most are squacco herons in immaculately tasteful breeding plumage and the white phase of the dimorphic egret (which is basically just a little egret but let’s not quibble over taxonomy). Among them, though, are great egrets, black egrets and a couple of exquisite Madagascar pond herons (shining white, electric blue bill, loopy crest: what’s not to love?). Overhead are Mascarene martins and Madagascar black swifts. Madagascar brush warblers dive through the undergrowth, a Madagascar swamp warbler tends its nest in a stand of Typha, and the morning is just about perfect.

And then it is perfect. Still chuffed from finding a jewel chameleon – our first chameleon of the tour – I raise my binoculars to the lake and among the hundreds and hundreds of red-billed teal they fall on a pair of Meller’s ducks. Meller’s duck: it’s rare, it’s endemic to Madagascar (though introduced to Mauritius), it’s increasingly hard to track down, it’s subtly beautiful, I dreamed of seeing it as a child, and it’s my thousandth species of vertebrate in 2012.

A thousand species.

Two Madagascar green sunbirds and a second jewel chameleon visited us over lunch in the centre of the city and in the afternoon we travelled through rice-paddies and agricultural terraces to the city of Antsirabe, adding Madagascar bushlark and Madagascar wagtail to our list.

There were so many other highlights today but I have a tour to lead and I need my beauty sleep.

To sleep. Perchance to dream of Meller’s ducks.

New today in Antananarivo and on the road to Antsirabe

	Birds
857	Madagascar fody	Foudia madagascariensis
858	Madagascar hoopoe	Upupa marginata
859	Mascarene martin	Phedina borbonica
860	squacco heron	Ardeola ralloides
861	dimorphic egret	Egretta dimorpha
862	white-faced whistling-duck	Dendrocygna viduata
863	red-billed teal	Anas erythrorhyncha
864	black egret	Egretta ardesiaca
865	Madagascar coucal	Centropus toulou
866	Madagascar white-eye	Zosterops maderaspatanus
867	hottentot teal	Anas hottentota
868	Madagascar squacco heron	Ardeola idae
869	Madagascar malachite kingfisher	Corythornis vintsioides
870	Madagascar brush warbler	Nesillas typica
871	Madagascar swamp warbler	Acrocephalus newtoni
872	Madagascar kestrel	Falco newtoni
873	yellow-billed kite	Milvus aegyptius
874	Madagascar black swift	Apus balstoni
875	Meller’s duck	Anas melleri
876	comb duck	Sarkidiornis melanotos
877	Madagascar green sunbird	Nectarinia notata
878	Madagascar bushlark	Mirafra hova
879	Madagascar wagtail	Motacilla flaviventris
	Reptiles
21	jewel chameleon	Furcifer lateralis

2012 Totals

Mammals: 85

Birds: 879

Reptiles: 21

Amphibians: 8

Fish: 11

Of mouse lemurs and men

16^th October

On the plane to Antananarivo tonight I talked at length to Steve Goodman, impossibly eminent Madagascar biologist, gifted linguist, committed conservationist, discoverer and describer of many of Madagascar’s small mammals, and one of a handful of living people after whom a lemur is named: Goodman’s mouse lemur, which I hope we shall see in three weeks’ time in Andasibe.

It was a privilege to talk to this open, friendly, humble man who seemed delighted to answer my naïve, ill-informed questions on taxonomy, conservation, culture and politics in his adopted homeland in the Indian Ocean. Many fascinating things emerged from our discussion, all of which will doubtless colour the Malagasy marshtittery to follow here in the coming weeks.

Immigration to Madagascar and baggage reclaim were, again this year, less of a thrill.

Paris Charles de Gaulle

A buzzard mobbed by crows on a damp October day.

The next station is Watlington.

Starlings swirl like thrown blankets over a fen field and three kestrels quiver.

Mute swans on a banked river.

Canada geese and a heron in the nine centuries shadow of Ely Cathedral.

Onion harvest fills the train with its stench.

The next station is Waterbeach.

King's Cross its usual crush and rush.

The tube. No mice. I'd hoped for mice.

The next station is Hammersmith. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. Change for the District and Hammersmith and City Lines.

This is a Picadilly Line service to Heathrow Terminals 4 and 1,2,3.

Doors open at South Ealing. A robin's quiet call.

Ash still green but hawthorn yellow. Horse chestnut crisp and caramel with its moth.

This is Boston Manor.

Over fifties brick the starlings swirling here.

LHR4. Turbulence. Charles de Gaulle.

Rabbits (des lapins) by the runway.

Bienvenue en France.

To the great red isle

A young swallow flew over us yesterday, on the East Bank at Cley. As quickly as the year she was gone.

With the swallows gone it is time I too flew south, to Madagascar, where my skies instead will be full of Mascarene martins, of African palm swifts and, by night, of the hollow drilling song of the Madagascar nightjar.

Access to the internet in Madagascar is in inverse proportion to endemism and weirdness in the island's wildlife. It will be hard for me to post there. I will write though and will post when I can; and, strange primitive primates that you are, you will all be in my thoughts.

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development - almost instantly after emerging on the earth by any evolutionary standard - the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

Lewis Thomas

The Medusa and the Snail

Ecclesiastes

We buried my great-uncle today. Had he lived another week he would have been ninety-five. His was a long, loving and loved life and when his end came he was ready. As we stood by his grave a posse of long-tailed tits trilled through the trees, a coal tit called and a nuthatch tapped out a hollow morse code. He, and my great-aunt who died some years ago, would have liked these birds coming to his quiet funeral. She was a friend of the bird artist Jack Harrison and once brought a capercaillie, which she had found dead on a Scots road, back to Norfolk in the boot of her mini for him to paint. The painting hung in the home my great-aunt and uncle shared. On another occasion, in the fledgling days of WWT, Peter Scott took her onto the grounds at Slimbridge to show her a vagrant red-breasted goose. She described the scene to Harrison and that picture too hung in their home.

They would have loved the long-tailed tits about his grave and the enchanter's nightshade, over which we walked, sticking its seeds to our suit trousers.

At the service in lofty Salle church I was struck by the simple wisdom of the second reading, which my uncle himself had chosen.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Ecclesiastes 3, 1-8