DOG HEADED MAN
Eyeball to eyeball with the fabled . . . that’s the name given to the ultra elusive lemur tracked down by our most famous naturalist using an ingenious trick – as he reveals in this magical account
IN THE first extract from his newly released early memoirs published in Saturday’s Mail, David Attenborough was dispatched to Madagascar in 1961 to film exotic creatures and maybe catch a few for London Zoo. Today, he describes how he and his BBC cameraman went in search of the rarest animal of all . . .
OUR FOOTSTEPS echoed with embarrassing loudness on the hotel lobby’s polished wooden floor. There seemed to be nobody about. We coughed apologetically and waited.
My cameraman colleague, Geoff Mulligan, and I had been warned that hardly anybody stayed at this hotel — why would they, situated as it was deep in the inhospitable forests of eastern Madagascar? But it seemed the perfect place to base ourselves in our search for one of the island’s most elusive creatures: its largest lemur, the indri.
After several minutes a door at the far end of the hall opened to reveal, to our astonishment, an extremely glamorous woman. Her lips were heavily reddened and her lashes blackened with mascara, and she wore a chic but flimsy silk housecoat that barely succeeded in covering her ample figure.
She was not yet fully awake, though it was by then almost midday. As she tottered towards us on stylish high heels, she was blinking sleepily and doing her best to rearrange her upswept coiffure.
Jeanine, as we were to discover later, was no ordinary hotel boss — she had once been a model and the proprietor of a fashionable bar in Madagascar’s capital, Tananarive, which she had been forced to leave because of what she darkly referred to as ‘ un grand scandale’.
She required a great deal of reassurance that we had not come to the area by mistake, but were hoping to book rooms for a fortnight or so. When we at last convinced her, we unloaded our belongings and went to meet the local forestry officer, an elderly Frenchman.
Our conversation was not profitable as he was lacking his dentures, and my French is passable at best. But he kindly offered us the services of a deputy, Michel, to show us the areas most likely to harbour the rare, mysterious and beautiful indri.
I had read as much as I possibly could about this extraordinary animal before I left Britain, and established that it is around 3ft tall, is coloured black or black-and-white and has huge hands, six times as long as they are broad.
What intrigued me most was the resemblance it bore to ancient drawings of a creature known to early explorers as the ‘dog-headed man’ peculiar to the area. It was always depicted as standing upright, with a shaggy coat and enormous, humanlike hands and feet. Its body was tail-less and proportioned like a human being’s, but with a face and a snout like a dog’s. Could the ‘dog-headed man’ be the indri? There were few eyewitness accounts — the one attempt to study it in captivity 20 years before had failed dismally. A group of indris sent to a Paris zoo all died within a month, the keepers having been unable to replicate their highly specialised diet of leaves.
Now here we were, with the chance to see one for ourselves. To watch and film one would, for me, be a glittering prize well worth all the effort and anticipation. AS GEOFF and I followed Michel into the twilight of the rainforest, our spirits sank.
This was the thickest bush we had encountered so far. Not only was it very dark, but the vegetation was so dense that unless we were lucky it would be impossible to get a filmable view of any creature more than a few feet away.
But the forest was extremely rich in animal life. From a small stream nearby came the honk of frogs, while from overhead came a confused chorus of birdsong.
As I stood trying to unravel this cacophony, the birdsong was suddenly drowned out by a chorus of spine-chilling, unearthly howls.
‘ Babakoto,’ said Michel, triumphantly — the local word for the indri. The noise was deafening — and eerily like the sound of a crying human child. But nothing could have prepared me for the volume. Even a gang of the noisiest children could not have produced a tenth of these decibels.
Desperately, we peered through the palisades of trunks and leafy curtains. But we could see nothing — not the tiniest patch of black fur, nor the flash of an eye.
Then, as abruptly as the wailing had begun, it stopped and the crickets, frogs and parrots took over once again. We were jubilant — the indris were really here.
‘Always they sing at the same time,’ said Michel. ‘They will be here again tomorrow. If they don’t sing, then call to them with their voice, and often they will reply.’
We turned up the next day with all our equipment, and the next, and the next. But of the indris there was neither sight nor sound. Hour after hour we waited, doing our best to imitate their calls. But no reply came back from the trees. There seemed nothing else to do but be patient. AFTER a week, I was beginning to lose faith in the possibility of ever seeing an indri. Had they moved on? We decided to try a different part of the bush.
Our first foray provided almost immediately a minor success, albeit not the one we had anticipated. Looking down to see where I was putting my feet, I noticed I was about to step into the middle of a collection of shiny olive-green objects the size of golf balls.
When I picked one up, a split opened on one side to reveal that it was in fact a huge insect with around 20 pairs of frantically waving legs. The creature straightened itself out, unfurled a pair of knobbly antennae and began walking determinedly up my arm.
I identified it as one of a strange species of millipede and I was sure they would make a wonderful display in London Zoo’s insect house. We filled our pockets and took 100 or so back to the hotel.
The millipedes were not our only acquisition. A few days later, the elderly forestry officer drew up at the hotel in his smart saloon car.
He was on his way to a meeting, but en-route had met some men carrying a newly- caught tailless tenrec — a comical, spiny creature looking like a cross between a hedgehog and an anteater.
Remembering us, he had given the men a few francs for the animal and, as he had no cage or sack handy, had put it loose in the boot of his car. It was, he said, extremely lively and ferocious.
Mindful of this, we assembled gloves, sacks and an empty cage, and the forestry officer cautiously lifted the boot lid an inch. I peered inside but could see nothing.
He widened the crack two inches, then, warning us to pounce swiftly, threw open the lid. Geoff and I lunged. But there was absolutely nothing upon which to pounce. The boot was empty!
GINGERLywe removed the tool-bag, the jack and the spare wheel. Again, nothing. As we wondered what to do next, we heard a scrabbling deep inside the chassis somewhere between the front and back mudguards.
By this time we had drawn a crowd of curious onlookers, and there was no lack of helping hands when I suggested that unscrewing the panels lining the interior was the only way to reach our quarry.
The invisible tenrec spurred us on by rattling about in his metallic cavern.
The forestry officer was starting to weary of the sight of his car
being dismantled, and proposed driving on to his meeting.
I pointed out that this would be most unwise, as the poor creature would almost certainly die — and if it did the smell would make his car unusable for at least a week.
A far better plan would be to shut the lid, join us for coffee and see if the tenrec would clamber out of its uncomfortable refuge in the chassis and return to the relative spaciousness of the boot.
Two hours later, we quietly opened the lid again. The tenrec was sitting at the back nonchalantly washing himself. He was the size of a large guinea pig, with an absurdly long tapering nose, immense whiskers, beady eyes and enormous hindquarters.
We pounced and seconds later he was in one of our travelling cages.
By the time we got him back to London and handed him over to the Zoo he had grown tremendously, increasing in both girth and length. But he never lost his passion for trying to cram his paunchy body down even the smallest suspicion of a hole.
My hotel room was now well stocked. Chameleons sat goggling at one another on the curtain rail. A frilled gecko hung upside down on a piece of bark in a cage next to the tenrec. The millipedes
slumbered in a box in one corner and three boa constrictors occupied a slowly moving sack in the other.
Every day we discovered fresh creatures to fascinate us: moths, beetles, snakes, lizards, black parrots, strange frogs — but we still had not found the indri.
An ORnITHOLOGIST friend had asked us to record the song of the Madagascan magpie robin — a sound he considered to be among the finest produced by any bird.
Geoff and I made our first attempt one day soon after dawn. When we arrived we found one, a handsome cock bird, singing heartily. Quickly, I plugged in the microphone and aimed it at him.
For several minutes the tape moved steadily. Then, suddenly, a deafening eerie wail pealed out from the trees beyond, so loud that the recorder needle thrashed
against the stop pin of the dial and clung there shuddering. It was the indri. But this time it was louder and closer.
Geoff snatched his camera and I frantically searched the trees, but we could see nothing. The calls stopped, and I caught a momentary glimpse of a body sailing through the air. The indri had gone. Once more, we had failed.
‘Well,’ said Geoff as we trudged back for breakfast. ‘At least we have a recording to prove it does exist, and that once upon a time we were within a few yards of one.’
Then I thought of a trick used by ornithologists to locate a bird they wish to study — playing a recording of its song to attract others. I didn’t have much confidence, but we had tried everything else.
For the next few days we played Geoff’s recording in several parts of the forest with no luck. Then, one morning I was about to pack up when the sound of the tape was suddenly drowned out by a series
of trumpeting hoots. They were unlike any animal sound I’d ever heard, and I couldn’t imagine what was making them. I looked up and saw one of the hooting creatures in a tree in a small dell nearby — a big, furry black-and-white lemur, sitting on a branch 30ft from the ground.
His chest, forearms and legs below the knee were white and he appeared to have a black cape round his shoulders, a pure white cap and black socks and gloves.
‘It’s a ruffed lemur,’ I whispered to Geoff. ‘We can get shots of them in Tananarive Zoo.’ nonetheless, we started filming, for he was a most beautiful creature.
Our tape recorder continued its indri wails. The lemur glared indignantly at us with bright yellow eyes. Once more he hooted his irritation, and another trumpeting sound came from a tree on the left. I turned and saw two more of the animals sitting with their necks craned forward, staring at us in puzzlement.
The first one reached up and pulled himself upright on to the branch above. I made a mental note that his movements were not like those of other lemurs, which are all four- footed. Then, as the animal sat down once more, I blinked in surprise.
‘Where’s he put his tail?’ I muttered. ‘He should have a very long, black one.’
‘Perhaps it’s curled up between his legs,’ said Geoff.
The animal raised a long hind leg and grasped the tree trunk. He did not have a tail. Stupidly, it took me a few seconds to reach the only possible conclusion. ‘Geoff,’ I said quietly, ‘ that is an indri.’
There was no doubt. There is only one tailless lemur. We were jubilant. We had found them — and Geoff had already shot a full 400ft of film.
Cautiously, he moved nearer to get shots from a different angle, but it was too much for the indris. With a gigantic bound, the first one leapt away, springing from trunk to trunk so rapidly that he seemed to ricochet from one tree to the other. The other two followed and within seconds were out of sight.
Before dawn we returned and there they were again, just as Michel had said they would be. Every day for a week we watched this little family: the big male, his mate and a younger pair, slowly getting to know their habits, routine and personalities.
The old male was of a sedate disposition, often sitting on a branch with his back against the main trunk and his long legs outstretched in a comically humanlike position. Although he could leap huge distances, he spent most of his time clambering happily from branch to branch in search of the most succulent young leaves.
The two youngsters were an extremely affectionate couple, and spent hours each day caressing one another. The position they chose in which to practise their endearments, crouching on a high horizontal bough, seemed perilous, like a pair of circus acrobats nonchalantly
enacting episodes of their daily lives on a high wire.
The fourth member of the group, the older female, we seldom saw. Only after several days did we learn the reason for her reticence. Clinging to her back was small, black-faced baby with hairy ears and bright eyes, barely a foot long.
He was an enchanting creature, sometimes riding on her back, sometimes clambering round to suckle. His mother behaved with endearing tenderness, licking him gently from time to time.
Our detailed knowledge of the family’s daily routine made our task of filming them easy. We photographed them feeding, dozing and caressing one another, but one shot we lacked — we had not secured any good pictures of them leaping, for when they moved off they always jumped away from us.
If we were to get the film we wanted before we left, we urgently needed a new approach.
We knew the location of the tree where they sang at lunchtime, and that they moved to an area further away to sing in the late afternoon. To get from one to the other, the indris would have to cross one of the area’s few wide roads.
Retracing their movements, we worked out that at only one place was the road narrow enough for them to leap comfortably across. A simple calculation was enough to show that they must make the crossing at between three and four o’clock in the afternoon.
Accordingly, at half-past two, Geoff and I set up our cameras a little west of the trees we judged they would use for their leap.
PROMPTat half past three, the old male duly appeared in the takeoff tree. The young couple joined him, then the mother and baby emerged from the forest behind to sit on one of the branches overhanging the road.
As soon as they were assembled, the old male climbed leisurely to the most outstretched branch. Geoff began filming.
The male poised himself, then made a single, soaring jump right across the road to the tree the other side. One by one the rest followed him and disappeared.
Geoff switched off his camera, beaming. After weeks of hope and crushing disappointment, our film of the private life of the indris was complete at last.
Were the creatures we had filmed really the origin of the dog-headed man? It was impossible to know. But of one thing I was certain. Of all the strange and wonderful creatures we had filmed in Madagascar, this was the rarest, the least documented and the most endearing.
AWARE of the BBC’s team’s disappointment at not being permitted to catch any lemurs, the Madagascar Scientific Institute presented them with two ring-tails and a ruffed lemur from its own collection. Their descendants thrived at London Zoo for decades.
The indri remains in critical danger of extinction, with a 2015 report revealing that no zoo has yet worked out the complexities of its diet, and that it is unable to breed in captivity. ADAPTED from Journeys To The Other Side Of The World: Further Adventures Of A Young Naturalist by Sir David Attenborough, published by Two Roads on September 6 at £25. © David Attenborough 2018. To order a copy for £20 (offer valid until September 8, 2018, p&p free), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.