Wildlife of Madagascar

"I chose this book because there are many field guides, but they tend to be quite specialized — on lemurs, birds or reptiles, and so on. This one is not exhaustive, but it’s all the plants and animals you’re likely to see and it’s very well done. In fact, to my knowledge it’s the only guidebook that includes such a wide array of plants and critters, with accurate information about them and where to see them, along with truly stunning photographs. I’ve not met the authors, but I do know that the first author, Ken Behrens, lives in Madagascar and is a professional photographer. He kindly let me use some of his photos in my book and, through that, I discovered that he’s married to Rojo, our elder daughter’s best Malagasy friend when they were both four years old and we spent a whole year in Madagascar — what a wonderfully small world it is sometimes… Madagascar has been an island 400 kilometers or so off the east coast of Africa for around 88 million years. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth and wiped out about 75% of land animals, including virtually everything in Madagascar. So you have an empty island that’s difficult to get to – reaching its shores involved flying, floating or swimming in the sea, or voyaging on a raft of vegetation. The result is that a lot of animals, land animals in particular, never got there. For example, only four of the 26 kinds of land mammals (warm-blooded, furry animals) living in the world today made it – primates, insectivores, carnivores and rodents – and the genetic evidence suggests that in each case it only happened once, far in the past. Imagine a hungry, wet and bewildered family of lemur ancestors struggling up the beach one day or night, 55 million years ago… “Around 95% of the plants and animals on the island are found nowhere else in the world” Madagascar became home for these intrepid voyagers, and they evolved in isolation for millions of years. And because Madagascar is big – like a continent – as well as isolated, a lot of diversification was possible, and natural selection gave rise to a wide array of species with distinctive ways of doing things. Thinking about grasslands and East Africa, you picture grazing zebras and wildebeest and other ungulates. But none of these reached Madagascar as far as we know. Instead, there were herds of giant tortoises, flightless birds three meters high, and giant lemurs lumbering around – all of them extinct today, sadly. Madagascar almost certainly had a grassland community but it was uniquely different — nature improvised with what was to hand, as it were. Around 95% of the plants and animals on the island are found nowhere else in the world, in fact. It has been called a floating evolutionary laboratory, but I tend simply to think of it as a magical place. I’m biased, obviously, but yes, it is stunningly beautiful. It’s not some Nirvana, though. There are many places where the landscape is devastating to behold, a reflection of the massive environmental challenges that face the island today."