Life after death in the land of the lemur

Twenty years after the conservationist Gerald Durrell died, new species are emerging on Madagascar at the rate of one per week. reports

(listening for insects inside tree trunks) and a fleshless, elongated middle finger (extracting them), were also the catalyst for its near demise. Nocturnal and rarely seen, over the centuries it found itself on the wrong side of the rural Malagasy people’s strict “fady” system of ancestral taboos. The word lemur comes from a Latin word meaning “spirits of the dead” and the aye-aye was believed to be an evil ancestral spirit that brought bad luck. It was also thought to kill humans in their sleep and was routinely hunted down.

My wife, Sarah, and I had long wanted to visit the island. Having just spent a year in the bush working in safari camps in Africa, we were all too aware of the poaching epidemic that had engulfed the mainland and wanted to see how Madagascar’s remaining biodiversity hot spots had fared in the 20 years since Durrell’s death.

In the capital, Antananarivo, we met Richard Lewis, programme director for the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, which helps endangered species recover and survive in the wild. Richard told us that although as much as 40% of Madagascar’s original forest habitat had been lost as recently as the late 20th century, the situation was gradually improving. Among his team’s recent success stories have been tracking down a smuggling ring that was illegally exporting the ploughshare, the world’s rarest species of tortoise; and helping the Madagascar pochard, the world’s rarest duck, re-establish itself in the wild after it was thought to have become extinct.

“Madagascar’s environmental problems have been largely caused by deforestation and intensive industrialisation during the colonial period and particularly just afterwards, in the