Of rice and timber

We were invited into the living room of the President of the fokontany, or municipality, where we would spent the next few days before heading back to our house in Maroantsetra. After two weeks spent visiting three villages in order to try to understand a bit about the diversity of livelihoods and forest management and use surrounding the newest and largest of Madagascar’s Natural Parks, this introduction to our fourth stop of the trip was notable. First of all, the fact that it had a living room was notable. The house itself, though larger than others we had visited, was not unlike the houses of the wealthier residents of various villages. It was made from hardwood from the forest surrounding the village,rather than raffia or bamboo, with a corrugated metal roof brought up river 6 hours by canoe from Maroantsetra, the main port and city in this corner of the island. We sat on furniture made of precious hardwood, the first sofas we encountered. In the corner stood two 2m long forestry saws and in the back room were goony sacks filled with unhulled rice, from the last crop to be harvested. Aside from farming, which is nearly everybody's first occupation, the president also works construction, building houses for residents of the town, buying his wood from residents who harvest it from the forest they have rights to, passed down through the last 2 or 3 generations or newly acquired.

The second set of sofas we saw were at the house of the man who owns the machine that hulls the rice. Most people in the surrounding area, and throughout much of Madagascar rely of large mortar and pestles to hull their rice little by little and sell what they can in the hulled form. In this town, though it costs a bit to use, people have access to a hulling machine, run on a generator with diesel brought up river again by canoe. In return for 50 ariary (2.5 cents), they receive rice that is fit for consumption and ready to be rebagged and either eaten or shipped back down on the canoes to Maroantsetra where it fetches about 400 ariary more per kilo than the unhulled rice.

The one person we met that didn’t see himself as a farmer first was the school teacher of this town. He had grown up in the area and had returned to teach there after studying. His wife runs a store in the front of their house to provide the necessities for everyday life in the village. In addition to the teaching and selling incomes, he also works as a carpenter, buying planks and rounds of hardwood trees from local loggers to fill his commissions for beds, chests and yes, sofas.

Ambodihazomami is well endowed with rice paddies and only recently have they began also cultivating the slopes surrounding the village.

The above anecdote illustrates a number of aspects of the political economy of rural life here. A utilization of the forest for both commercial and subsistence purposes that is fueling both a local market for luxury goods and a transformation of agricultural technology that is allowing for export to the administrative hub. As apparent in the above photo, this town is surrounded by a significant amount of rice paddy. It was interesting to talk with folks about the changes in land use over time. I was told that up until about 20 years ago they had only planted rice one per year and that it sufficed. But as population has grown and inheritances of rice paddies being divided between the children has shrunk them, they moved to planting twice per year. As of three years ago or so, they began also farming rice on the hills, which requires cutting the trees and burning the soil. One of those that I talked to, who makes a living from timber, thinks that people should be trying to improve their techniques of paddy rice farming instead. And others worry that there just isn't enough land, and that the new protected area to their North will have to be used by the next generation.

This situation stands in contrast to the two other villages we visited during this mission, which had began working with the conservation NGO in charge of the protected area to create community managed conservation zones to act as a buffer. Neither of them had as much paddy land, being in narrower valleys. They both had extensive use of the hillside for rice farming such that the immediate slopes surrounding the villages were mostly cultivated rather than left as forest. In both villages they are no longer longer permitted to harvest timber for sale, and have to request permits to cut wood for their houses and to do agricultural clearings. In exchange, if they are diligent in their work, the conservation NGO provides development assistance in terms of latrines, metal roofs for schools, and nice, wood-paneled, metal roofed buildings for offices. There is some vanilla and cloves being grown and sold in all the villages but in a number of ways there seems to have been a basic trade off of timber for conservation in these two.

The hills around Andaparaty have been more heavily cultivated. The land in the foreground is newly returning to fallow.

At the end of our first mission, we have learned a great deal about the diversity of uses and economies related to land and the forest in this area. Eli, my field assistant, Gerandine, our camp steward, and I are spending the week caring for gear and doing data entry before heading out tomorrow for another few weeks of visiting villages. On the first mission we piloted household surveys to understand livelihoods strategies, perspectives on conservation and knowledge of forest use rules. We also talked to a number of community and conservation leaders to begin stratifying communities based of governance systems. On this next trip we will continue with that work while piloting forest use transects and vegetation plots. Next year then, when our survey effort really cranks up, we should be able to connect livelihood strategies and land use institutions to levels and types of forest use.

Dispatches from the Great Island - Take 5

Just a quick post to re-boot this blog.

I arrived in Tana a couple days ago. I will be in Madagascar through August. One more summer to get to know this island (well, as the last two nights reminded me as I was trying to find more blankets - it's winter here)! While I am settling in and waiting for my bags to arrive (hopefully they are two days behind me...) I realized that there is plenty of interest going on that should have been utilizing this space for.

View from my balcony at Niaouly Hotel overlooking the East end of Avenue de l'Independence

Over the last year, I've been settling into a PhD program at Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. During that time I finished up my thesis from Wisconsin and have been a co-author on two papers that stemmed from work around Ankeniheny-Zahamena. Id like to let you all know what that was about, but for an introduction to the field work that was involved, you can see this post. Hopefully, those posts will be able to function as a wonderful epilogue in lieu of the second chapter that never materialized.

I have begun work on a new project that will be in Maroantsetra. You can check out Dr. Chris Golden's website for tons of information about the area and the work that he has conducted there. I'll be collaborating with him and his team to expand efforts to take a deeper look at forest management institutions and access to forest resources.

I made a quick trip there in January with a couple of faculty members. Ill try to update briefly on my initial impressions from this first trip. I will be looking at issues of access to land and forest resources as they relate to conservation, people's livelihoods, and health outcomes. Ill try to provide some real-time impressions of what some of the points of contention are around Makira Natural Park. You can bet that the REDD funding mentioned in that article is going to be one, but I'll be very interested in what local people think on all things forest and farming.

Madagascar's political crises continues - it's high time to get caught up on some links. For a start, you should definitely be aware of the financial consequences, as presented by the World Bank.

That should take us through the summer. If there is anything in particular you'd like to see here, let me know.

New sapphire rush underfoot - this time in sensitive rainforest

An article in the Telegraph sheds light on a rush to extract sapphires from the rainforest of Eastern Madagascar where I work.

This follows in the wake of substantial gold mining in the area in recent years. The mining has increasingly become a problem in the absence of state enforcement and as local management groups are fighting to gain control over their forests. When I was there last July, I frequently heard the refrain that the law protects what's above the soil but not what's under it.

Artisanal gold-mining pits are rather small and though they may extend in a network over a square kilometer or more, the damage is far more localized than much larger open pit, organized sapphire mining. Photo © Sara Tolliver 2011

Many local people were turning to mining to make a living because they didn't see any other alternatives. It is perceived as a way out of poverty despite the fact that many toil severely without finding enough gold to make it worth their while.

How should we prioritize conservation action globally?

Warning: technical material ahead...

Driven by the agreement set by the signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity to “significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 (Jones et a 2011),” conservation prioritization became a hot topic. In light of recent indications that the rate of biodiversity loss has not declined and pressure on areas of high diversity has increased (Butchart et al. 2010), this continues to be a pressing issue. Here I review a piece from 2006 by Brooks et al. entitled "Global Biodiversity Conservation Priorities" which tries to sort out the most effective way of prioritizing conservation ahead of the 2010 assessment, and apply the lessons to what we see in Madagascar today.

Brooks et al (2006) looked at prioritization schemes set by major conservation NGOs and classified them based on axes of irreplaceability and vulnerability. Irreplaceability is usually indicated by levels of endemism, but can include taxonomic uniqueness  and rarity of habitat types but these are hard to quantify. Richness is not of primary concern because “species richness is driven by common, widespread species; thus, strategies focused on species richness tend to miss exactly those features most in need of conservation (Brooks et al 2010).” Vulnerability is not clearly defined here but is a temporal indicator of threat. The most commonly used indicators are proportional habitat loss and protected area coverage. The authors bemoan the lack of consideration of demographic change, pressure from hunting, governance and institutional weaknesses and (which I found hugely surprising that it wasn't present) cost.

There is also a spatial component to these schemes and they all use overlapping “ecoregions” to define funding rather than a grid-based system. This has substantial effects on prioritization and the authors suggest normalizing these ecoregions because they are biased towards larger ones. Grid-based methods, however, like that used by Kremen et al (2008) to prioritize nationally in Madagascar, should supersede this concern.

By mapping the 9 most common prioritization schemes the authors were able to find high overlap within two groups of strategies, proactive and reactive, but not across them. Both proactive and reactive strategies prioritize high irreplaceability but reactive strategies also prioritize those with high vulnerability because these are the sites where action is most urgently needed while the proactive strategies prioritize low vulnerability because this is where conservation is most easily done(less politically charged and often cheaper).

The authors judge the success of the prioritization based on how much of the flexible funding available for conservation it was able to capture – the wrong measure. Shouldn’t we judge success on conservation outcomes? If we are going to focus on finances we should be looking at cost-effectiveness, which isn't included at all here, rather than funds captured. This data is becoming more readily available and will be a factor of future prioritizations so as that data is incorporated, this is likely to change. There are also political reasons why this is the wrong measure – CI appears to be moving away from the Hot Spot approach (or so says Kareiva, the head of The Nature Conservancy), lauded here for garnering the largest share of the pie, and turning to a people-centered ecosystem service approach to prioritizing funding. If the "success" of these priorities are so transient they are not useful in making future prioritizations. 

Most of Madagascar, especially the highly diverse moist forests, is prioritized by most of the reactive schemes, while the dry deciduous forests of the west are also prioritized under proactive schemes that look for areas of low threat. The overlap here demonstrates the need to more deeply investigate the level of vulnerability of this ecosystem.

Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena (CAZ) illuminates some of the complexity of prioritization. Madagascar itself was identified under the Hot Spot approach by Conservation International, a reactive scheme, but the particular site, an approximately 400,000ha area of contiguous forest, was selected based on irreplaceability and low vulnerability (ie it was an easy area to protect because of low human populations in the forest interior). Now, an ecosystem-service narrative, rather than a biodiversity one drives continued funding and discourse around CAZ. This shows the differences of scale and discourse in prioritization, which aren’t captured by an assessment of global schemes.

While there may be overlap between biodiversity priorities and ecosystem service priorities in terms of carbon and water quality, they by no means must overlap and we need to be clear about what it is that we are prioritizing. As of now, while we are shifting toward a commodity view of how to protect areas, there is far too often a lack of clarity. In fact, we still don’t have a strong understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and specific ecosystem services. This muddiness and ambiguity is yearning for clarity.

Citations

Brooks, T. M., Mittermeier, R. A., da Fonseca, G. A. B., Gerlach, J., Hoffmann, M., Lamoreux, J. F., Mittermeier, C. G., et al. (2006). Global Biodiversity Conservation Priorities. Science, 313(7 July 2006), 58-61.

Butchart, S. H. M., Walpole, M., Collen, B., van Strien, A., Scharlemann, J. P. W., Almond, R. E. a, Baillie, J. E. M., et al. (2010). Global biodiversity: indicators of recent declines. Science (New York, N.Y.), 328(5982), 1164-8. doi:10.1126/science.1187512

Jones, J. P. G., Collen, B., Atkinson, G., Baxter, P. W. J., Bubb, P., Illian, J. B., Katzner, T. E., et al. (2011). The why, what, and how of global biodiversity indicators beyond the 2010 target. Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 25(3), 450-7. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01605.x

Kremen, C., Cameron, A., Moilanen, A., Phillips, S. J., Thomas, C. D., Beentje, H., Dransfield, J., et al. (2008). Aligning Conservation Priorities Across Taxa in Madagascar with High-Resolution Planning Tools. Science, 320(222), 222-226. doi:10.1126/science.1155193

Has anything happened in Madagascar the last 6 months?

Re-revving the bloggin engine.


Here are a list of links that focus on Madagascar and/or conservation that I was considering reacting more fully to over the last 6 months. Oldest first.

New research agenda for Africa’s dry forests defined at Durban - CIFOR
Back in December, in conjunction with COP17 in Durban, a 1 dy conference was held to discuss dryland forest. Despite covering much of the African continent, this ecosystem has been largely ignored by carbon politics because it is far less densely forested than humid forests. It also happens to support more than half the population of the continent. This piece highlights the take homes from the conference, dryland forest value and some of the challenges.

Madagascar squares up to 'extreme' climate vulnerability - AlertNet
Also at Durban, there was discussion of the vulnerability of Madagascar to climate change. "Maplecroft, an international risk analysis firm, ranks Madagascar third for “extreme” climate risk in the world, behind only Bangladesh and India, Rakotoarisoa said." FOlks are working on rice intensification through low-till processess and flood and drought resistant seeds. THey have also been developing early-warning systems for cyclones, which became very necessary as two major cyclones hit Madagascar in the months after this report.

Madagascar’s Lemurs, Sacred No More - NYTimes
There was a flurry of coverage in the wake of a couple of papers that came out around hunting and taboos in Madagascar. One of the things things that Jenkins et al (2011) noted was that as traditional taboos were changing (due to migration and religious transitions amongst others) that endangered lemurs were becoming more culturally acceptable to hunt. This work was done very close to and found far higher rates of bushmeat consumption than we did.

Caution urged in sale of Madagascar's illegal timber stockpiles - Mongabay
In light of the recent announcement that Gabon is set to burn its ivory stockpiles, this February discussion of how to deal with Madagascar's illegally harvested precious hardwood's gains some poignancy. "Done right, funds from selling timber at auction could go toward forest protection and poverty alleviation efforts. Done wrong, sales of confiscated timber could enrich traffickers, boost demand for Madagascar's rare hardwoods, and spur new logging."
Help Madagascar Silk Weavers Share Their Experiences and Work Towards Sustainability - Hurry Boy It's Waiting There For You
Intrepid blogger and Madagascar RPCV Chris Planicka shares a story about the silk weavers of Madagascar and their (still current) efforts to get the cash they need to build markets in the US for their amazing scarves and hats. This effort is being innovated upon by NGOs in the north of the island in their attempt to find sustainable incomes for folks living next to and within new protected areas. The PCV -partnered project that Chris talks about seems to have better footing to me.

Indonesian 'Eves' colonised Madagascar 1,200 years ago - PhysOrg

A recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society determined from genetic analysis that about 30 women (plus men, potentially) settled Madagascar from Indo-Polynesia about 1200 years ago. Women weren't found on trading vessels so the question is open as to how they came to arrive in Madagascar...

Species Hitched Ride to Madagascar on Floating Islands - Live Science

Madagascar has been seperated from the mainland for 80 million years and the species on the isalnd radiated after that time. So how did they get there? By comparing the times and locations that current species on the island would have separated from their nearest neighbors, Karen Samonds from the University of Queensland, Australia says we can conclude that it must have been on large rafts of vegetation floating across the Mozambique channel. "For example," she says, "DNA evidence indicates that just one primate species made it across, probably 40 or 50 million years ago, and that ancestral form gave rise to the 101 descendent species you can find in Madagascar today."

and finally...

Learning on the Road to Nowhere in Madagascar - NYTimes Scientists at Work Blog

An entomologist who has worked for years in Madagascar tries to reach a largely pristine forest in one of the remotest corners of the island during the peak of rainy season. What can go wrong. This exciting post shows how adventurous (and maybe a bit crazy) we have to be to love doing this kind of work.

Gibson and CITES: Attention finally being paid to Madagascar?

If you know anything about socio-ecological issues in Madagascar, you know that exploitation of precious timber, especially rosewood, ebony, and polysandre, has been especially egregious since the 2009 coup d'etat. Even if you don't know anything about Madagascar, you might have heard recently of the ramifications of this through your rabid devourment of American political news. US Fish and Wildlife Service investigations of Gibson guitar have become a battleground between tea-party activists who think the government is over-regulating and environmentalists who see corporate greed ravishing the forests of impoverished nations like Madagascar. Here's a link to a fairly comprehensive article about the case from the Tennessean, published in the home state of Gibson Guitars.

The Myth of the Virgin Forest

A new meta-analysis of 138 studies across the tropics was published in the online edition of Nature a few days ago and found that, “primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining biodiversity.”

I was drawn to this article because it has been picked up by the popular media. This piece is already being wielded to call from stronger protection of these forests. In interview, one of the first authors does just this. Luke Gibson tells us, “It is therefore essential to limit the reach of humans and to preserve the world’s remaining old-growth rainforests while they still exist. The future of tropical biodiversity depends on it.”

What interests me is that it is never clear what forests they are talking about. Part of the problem is that the language is loose. Are “primary” and “old-growth” the same thing? Gibson seems to imply so.

In a quick google search of the sources publishing about this article, nearly every one on the first page uses a different epithet for these forests. From the first 6 headlines we get: “Virgin forests,” “natural forests,” “old growth forests,” “primary forests,” “pristine forests,” and “rainforest.” All of these names seem to conjure an idea of an untouched forest far from humans where nature can thrive free from the negative effects of our species. They all embody the wilderness myth.

To further highlight this let’s see what kind of land this pristine forest is contrasted against. “Degraded forests,” “disturbed forests” and “a re-modeled home,” and one piece from The Conversation tells us, “We live in an age of vanishing rainforests.”

This is the conservation myth.

Anatomy of an Expedition. Part One.

In August, two fellow grad students from UW-Madison came out to Madagascar to conduct fieldwork for a project to document the critically endangered Greater Bamboo Lemur, Prolemur simus, using trail cameras, and to gather interview data related to forest use and specifically the culture of hunting. They stayed for 2 weeks. Here is a log of our expedition (a word I do so love to use).

August 4

I picked up Erik and Britt at the airport a bit after midnight. We headed back to the hotel to have a preliminary meeting with a preliminary THB (Three Horses Beer, the national beer of Madagascar), and to catch up and revel in the excitement of the impending expedition, before catching a few hours of zzzs.

Erik and Britt still bleary-eyed from two days travel in the down-stairs part of our little loft at Sakamanga

Agroforestry Conundrums: Vanilla vs. Camphor

A recent series of posts (Well, back in May, but still…) by Noah Jackson, over at Rainforest Alliance’s Frog Blog, focused on vanilla farming in Madagascar. He is an auditor for RA, travels the world meeting farmers and foresters, assessing the sustainability of their practices and compliance with certification standards. He makes the point about how important it is for vanilla farming to be sustainable. Especially in Madagascar:

Vanilla grows in the northern part of the country, where coastal and montane rainforests thrive. In a place as biodiverse as Madagascar, growing and cultivating crops like vanilla in harmony with nature is particularly important –  irresponsible farming could threaten the integrity of this incredible landscape.

But if its like most of the crops in Mada very little is certified because of how expensive it is to do the audits and stay up to date with the latest requirements. There are, however,  folks  trying still export crops the right way. People like From the Field Trading, composed primarily of 2 rpcvs and the farmers that they have lived and worked with for years. 

Searching for freshwater fish in Mada - what it can say about forest conservation

In a new blog post from the field for The New York Times, John Sparks describes his search for an incredibly rare and recently discovered species (1990s) of Damba, a genus of fish endemic to Madagascar.

He highlights the plight of freshwater fish on the red island: 

“It should be painfully obvious to the reader from my earlier posts that Madagascar’s native freshwater fishes are in very serious trouble — narrow endemism and widespread habitat degradation are a dangerous combination. Throw in competition with an array of exotic species, and you have the ingredients for a full-blown disaster. Essentially, freshwater fishes are afforded little protection within the isolated patches of protected forest that remain throughout the country, and within which one can still find relatively healthy populations of lemurs, chameleons and other native vertebrates. Most of these forest reserves are at higher elevation, where there is little suitable habitat for fishes other than rheophilic gobioids (gobies and eleotrids). In addition, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a watershed that has not been affected to some degree by deforestation throughout its course — and obviously, the negative effects of siltation persist downstream to the sea.”

But its not just fish that are threatened in freshwater systems: The lac alaotran lemur is critically endangered and the Alaotra grebe has recently been declared extinct.

One thing in his post that intrigued me is his emphasis on tilapia and their importance to local livelihoods:

Photo Essay: How a vazaha tries to support community-based conservation in Madagascar

[disclaimer: my 'w' key is quite broken; if any are missing from the following post, please blame the beer I spilled on my computer at the internet cafe]

After months of wrangling with the writing on the avowed blog post on the intersection of conservation and development; after venturing to begin stories in formats such as the academic essay, the travel log, and the fictional account; after starting and scraping a plethora of garbage stories all in an attempt to tell the story of what I am doing here in an informative and engaging way - I give up.

After fretting so profusely, I realized that I am in the capital now, have a decent internet connection (wireless!), have a bunch of photos and that it is easier for me and probably more enjoyable for you, just to post some pictures, with some minimal words to provide context. Why didn't one of you experienced bloggers clue me into this oh-too-obvious format earlier? For a funny and informative (and more frequently updated!) discussion on some of the frustrations of working on these issues nearby in Madagascar, you should totally read Chris Planicka's blog. This post will be limited to explaining some of the work I have been doing. Maybe, in the future, but at this rate probably not, I'll actually write that other post I keep mentioning....

So here we go. What do I do?
I work with groups like this. It took me a day to ride the 55km or so that it takes to get out to

Waterfall recuperation

Right now I am sitting on an outcrop of rock, in the middle of a river, at the top of a waterfall that is at least 500 ft. tall, looking out at a series of ridges that transition from rainforest, to cultivation to meadow covered rolling hills, all the way to the ocean, with my foot in a bucket. This is camp, where I, 2 WWF field agents, 1 WWF intern from Quebec and 8 villagers who are learning to manage this forest, are living for 20 days.

I should be out in the forest with the others, training the villagers to take tree diameters and learning from them the names and uses of dozens of species. Instead, I am sitting at camp with the two villagers who are the cooks for the day, one of who has a 3 inch gash on his shin from chopping firewood, the other who walked to his village this morning to get tobacco and bananas, with my other foot in a bucket now.

Last month I was using GPS to survey some highly disturbed land that had recently been rainforest. The most common plants which invade these cleared swaths all have thorns and I managed to get a few scratches on my feet, due in part to my efforts at cultural integration which lead me to wear jelly sandals (they really are the best things for swampy, steep forest walking; they blow my chacos away). I also scratched open a few mosquito bites.

A Day in the Life...

“No mon. He just play the fool, cause for him dass de way life go de best.”

-Peter Matthiessen, Far Tortuga

A few days ago, Jamila, Liz, Manora (three of the volunteers working with us this summer), Robson, Augustin (two of our filed agents), and I set out from Vondrozo for Tsaratana, a hamlet 30km. away. This is the start of a 2-week field trip to do some forest mapping and awareness-raising in the villages. We were on bike, with 15 porters carrying our stuff. The porters get paid a daily rate of 3000 Ar. or about $2.00, which is good by local standards. We made it about 20 km. the first day because we left in the afternoon, then stashed our bikes in a mayor’s office and had to walk the last 2 kilometers, through rice paddies and across a small river, into town.

That first evening, the village presented us with two chickens, as an offering, and they were to be our supper. This was the first time yet that I was confronted with the dilemma of whether to eat meat and I took it in stride. It turned out to be the most spiritual meal that I have eaten since being in retreat in Nepal – pondering every bite and really experiencing my food. Parts don’t go to waste hear and I even ate the liver.

Then that night there was kilalaky, or a village dance. In silvery moonlight, a plastic drum and makeshift symbol led the beat as boys danced in a circle with the girls in a line behind them, breaking into the circle every so often in pairs to do a sort of shimmy punctuated with the blows of a whistle. When I tried to dance with them they all ran away giggling, so I had to dance off to the side as I watched with the adults.

I was explaining to the volunteers how much I am changing here and they all agreed that I seem very at home here, in my element, and that this place is good for me. That was very reassuring considering all the doubt that I have been dealing with.

Our tents were set up in the center of the village, which is strange to me. We were constantly on display and had to seek refuge in our tents in order to avoid constant stares. I was glad to head off to the forest the next day, to get a rest from feeling like an alien. I was really wishing I were better with language because the villagers seem so cool and we would try to talk but it was just so strained most of the time.

Then yesterday we headed into the forest. Our job is to map out the lines of delimitation between different usage zones in the area of forest that is to be managed by the COBA of Tsaratana. So we have to walk along, using whatever trails or ridges or rivers are available taking points every couple hundred meters for about 4 kilometers, making sure that the villagers understand where the line is and what the difference is use is. Because these zones are all towards the edge of the forest (only the last, strict protection, is solid forest) they have been cut in spots and cultivated in others, and the regrowth is often spiny and brushy, and the valleys are swampy – one volunteer fell in up to her waste yesterday. It is tough going.

Today started at 5:00with me having dreams of having to pee and in my dream I keep looking at my watch because I want to get up but it keeps showing a time like two in the morning so I keep waiting until I finally realize that I am dreaming and get up to go out of the tent. At 6:30 I have coffee with Robson and the porters, and then we have to wait until 9:00 for breakfast of rice and voanjobory, a groundnut related to the peanut but more like a bean in flavor and texture. I am proud because I can finally eat a ‘Gasy portion of rice like the rest of the guys. By 10:30 camp is packed off and we split into two teams of an agent and a local guide, with volunteers, to do the work. There is also a group of porters that will move camp while we are out to a spot a couple km. up the way. For the next 6 hours we have the pleasure of fighting through thorny, swampy, pathless lands, swatting mosquitoes, picking off leeches, etc. Not my most pleasant forest experience to date, and damn hard work. I am stoked for my cup of coffee (though I never use sugar back home, here it is very sweet and concentrated, about a shot and a half) when we finally make it back to camp. By 6:00 we are eating and here I am at 7:00 in bed. Two meals a day of heaping plates full of rice. That’s a day in the field with WWF.

First Rainforest Excursion

We are at Mahatsinjo, a private reserve run by an NGO where another volunteer works, literally across the street from Andasibe National Park, the most visited park in the country. We are all excited to finally see the rainforest after 1½ months of seeing only the transformed landscape of the plateau. Most of us are in a hotel but a few of us have chosen to camp at the park. They have a few sand pits with ravinala roofs over them that you can set your tent up in. They even have a light bulb, which I think is a bit excessive.

It is really nice to be in the rainforest, though it is awfully dry and there are eucalyptus and pine trees all around. But as soon as one gets back into the forest proper it is clear how much incredible biodiversity there is here and how totally unlike the rest of the plateau it is.

Two days ago we went on a night hike. I didn’t see any nocturnal lemurs, but rather a huge chameleon, and a nocturnal moth and snail, both of which are the size of my hand. We also saw Brookesia, the family that claims the smallest chameleon in the world.

Today, we got to see and hear the Indri, who’s haunting song carries for kilometers and is one of the most incredible noises I have ever encountered. Sifaka, brown lemurs, couas (one of the five endemic bird families on the island), paradise flycatcher, giraffe-neck weevils, you name it. Everything but the golden bamboo lemur, one of the rarest primates in the world, which was recently discovered in the area.

It is very inspiring to see all the scientific work that this local NGO is doing, and how they are using ecotourism to fuel the development of their village. I also got a chance to build some rainforest trail and help plant trees in a forest restoration project. They collect mycorrhizal soil and seeds form the forest, grow the seedlings in the nursery, then plant them in strategic patches close to the forest, paying attention to the interspacing of fast and slow growing, short and long lived trees. The forest is given enough of a head start this way that it can out compete the invasives that one finds all around where people once cut and burned the land. It is an incredible process to see and unfortunately in danger from loss of funding.