Welcome to my office

‘Welcome to my office,’ announced Maurice Ratsisakanana Besoa, our designated guide to the Andasibe Mantadia sections of the Perinet Rainforest Reserve some four hours by road due east of Madagascar's capital, Antananarivo. We were standing on a small wooden slatted bridge across a muddy red stream at the edge of a clearing in the Eastern highlands montane rainforest.

‘The office furniture is made from the finest hardwood,’ he continued developing his well rehearsed theme and stroking the lichen mottled trunk of the nearest tree, ‘and the birds are my telephone.’ We paused with him to take in a note or two of birdsong right on cue.

‘E-mail access?’ I queried in what I hoped was a suitable entry into the obviously playful spirit of this patter. At that moment the booming siren cry of the indri (largest of the lemur species) rang out across the clearing and was answered by another similar yodel from a distant mountainside.

‘It’s for you,’ countered Maurice with a triumphant twinkle in his gentle brown eyes.

Seeing the rainforest through Maurice’s eyes was a very intense and yet relaxing experience. He is a consummate professional in the business of subtly directing and shepherding his charges along the paths and towards the flora and fauna he knows so intimately. He is another who is fluent in at least four languages when it comes to opening and filing all the entries in his office marked lemur, bird, orchid, frog, chameleon, medicinal plant and tree. To these languages of professional guiding he adds the language of birdsong where he is an instant and irrepressible mimic of any notes he hears. Walking with him is like spending time with the conductor of a concert orchestra tuning up behind the scenes.

‘Lemurs don’t keep appointments in this office, unfortunately,’ he confesses and then adds with his customary wink, ‘but they are creatures of habit!’ And so we feel entirely confident that with the aid of this extraordinary man’s talent, we will see and hear everything that is on offer in this most green and peaceful of high places.

It’s a world of moss, fungus and lichen covered tree trunks varying in girth from fingers of trailing liana to the four-armed circumference of the forest’s oldest standing tree columns. In places you are surrounded by Gothic cathedral pillars of tree fern and spongy bark ascending to filigree canopy twenty metres high and in others you are hemmed in by thickets of bamboo and vine creeper. Ancient cycads at drunken angles look as if they may have been carelessly shouldered aside by a tyrannosaurus while a fallen log pillar stands waist high across the path finally felled in its long wrestle with a strangler fig.

In places, Maurice pointed out familiar names in an entirely exotic context – vanilla (an epiphyte orchid runner in its native form) or wild strawberry and asparagus. Sometimes the narrow path comes rushing towards you as a tumble of mossy rock like an arrested green waterfall, sometimes it falls away steeply down a buttressed ravine of roots. And it’s a rainy forest – the essential clue is in the name really. From time to time we pulled on and off our waterproofs never quite sure whether we’d be too hot and humid with them or too squelchy and wet without them. And then the sun would break through the spreadeagled shape of a vakona palm and light up a birds nest tree fern and a little gentle steam would rise from everyone as we dried out and kept tramping on in Maurice’s sure footsteps.

We were tracking a family of diademed sifakas. When we finally got within sight of them – our sight, Maurice had been observing them for some time – there they were contentedly munching their breakfast. Our breakfast of coffee and rolls was hours away at the Vakona Forest Lodge and the delicious looking honey and caramel diademed sifakas, like their chocolaty cream cousins the Coquerel’s, had the effect of making me feel instantly and ravenously hungry.

We made gradual progress as the sifakas chomped their way sedately through the forest. Maurice has the ability to tap into any of his passing filing cabinets and pull out a story about the medicinal qualities of a leaf, the camouflage of a gecko or the pollination routine of a flower. He also understands the immense power of silence when facilitating other people’s experience of their new surroundings and quite a lot of our time with him was conducted in the sort of hushed ethereal quiet that falls when you know you are somewhere special for a short space of time.

‘Stop,’ commanded our guide and proceeded to manoeuvre us skillfully into place between some slippery roots until we could get a clear view into the canopy of our next lemur appointment. ‘Common brown, red-fronted, male and female,’ he declared once we could see the pair now almost directly above us. We’d seen common brown lemurs in Anjajavy but of the white-fronted variety and they’re as different as Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen – although less argumentative than either species. We’d now seen two of the big three diurnal lemur species in this part of the rainforest which left just the booming indri or ‘Babakoto’ (father of the child) as he is known locally.

The name ‘indri’ apparently derives from the Malagasy meaning ‘up there’ and it was mistakenly believed to refer to the actual animal itself by the first European naturalists who were expertly and kindly guided around the same forests in the 1860’s by Maurice’s predecessors. The legend of Babakoto refers to a small boy lost in the forest who rather than meeting wicked witches, big bad wolves or evil hobgoblins is fortunate enough to be rescued by a large black and white primate looking somewhere between a panda and a koala bear. The story seems to reveal the essentially benevolent and symbiotic relationship which the Malagasy people still enjoy with their unique neighbours. The fact that they are in desperate competition for the same increasingly scarce resources of wood and soil has not altered the essential respectful bond between man and animal despite a ballooning human population (20 million today projected to double in the next 20 years.)

By the time we, or rather Maurice, eventually tracked down the resident indri troop, I felt as if I already knew the creatures from their haunting whale song calls and from their many poster boy publicity pictures and that I was simply being granted an audience with a local celebrity. They did not disappoint. Suddenly they were all about us overhead. Four big, heavy adults with their stumpy sawn-off tails and big teddy bear ears. When they opened their mouths to utter one of their by now familiar howls, their lips were a livid red and their heads snapped back sharply to help project the sound. It was more football terrace shout than grand opera it must be said but it more than commanded its auditorium. Like all lemurs the indri despite its size (approximately 2ft in body length and 4ft tall with hind legs fully extended and weighing around 12-15kgs) is an agile trapeze athlete and thinks nothing of a 10metre tree to tree leap without a safety net. Madagascar has never won an Olympic medal of any colour but the average indri standing jump would have won gold in every Games since 1896.

Yet despite its big, booming voice, size and athletic prowess, the indri is a sensitive soul much disturbed by habitat shrinkage and disruption to its food supply. An indri’s diet comprises over 40 different specialized forms of vegetation found specifically in certain eastern highland forests and to remove them from this environment is a certain death sentence. A team of primatologists from Duke University, North Carolina found this out to their cost when in the mid 1970’s they tried to encage a monogamous pair of indris in a purpose built enclosure deep in the endemic forest itself. Their methods were considered advanced at the time representing an improvement on traditional zoo capture and internment. However the indri quickly moped and died in forest captivity within sight and sound of their free bounding fellows. To this day no method of keeping the indri in captivity has been devised, thus restricting any breeding programmes. The animals remain free spirits calling out as the darkness closes on their wilderness.

We moved on from indri watching, or rather they moved on from lunching over our heads and made our way back down to the clearing and the bridge where we had first met Maurice. He had indeed shown us around his office and introduced us to his extraordinary world. I wondered about my ability to give him an equivalent urban jungle tour in a location of my choice. Downtown Cape Town perhaps? Shell’s offices in The Hague are full of strange creatures? The London Underground maybe? I’m not sure I could do anywhere quite the justice that this genuinely humble man brings to his daily commute and communion.