June 10, 2004
"Eyes of the Forest"
by Jodie LaPoint

When you're camping, you often find yourself going to bed ridiculously early. After dinner is over, it's dark out, the mosquitos are buzzing in your ears, you're tired from a day of hiking and you find the best place to be is in your tent. Whatever your intentions are--maybe to read a bit or write a letter
home--you often end up drifting off to sleep...at about 8pm. So it was with some trepidation, as well as excitement, that I set off into the forest for a nocturnal lemur census, while the camp slept. Three fellow researchers and a Malagasy student also picked up their flashlights and braved the dark night forest. We got to the head of the trail, and when I turned to look expectantly at Alain, he said, "You go first." Well, I'd been on nocturnal hikes before, but they were always led by Malagasy guides that seemed to know just where to find the little lemurs-I wasn't sure I was up to the task of leading one myself. But I set out, the beam of my Mag-lite bouncing from tree to tree. The idea is to find the lemurs that are active at night by their eyeshine, a reflection of your light in their eyes. Our daytime lemur census had been completely fruitless so far, so I didn't know what to expect tonight. Suddenly I saw two little yellow eyes looking at me from about 2 meters off the ground. I grabbed Alain's arm and pulled him to where he could see it too. I was absolutely ecstatic that I'd found the first lemur, and all by myself!
"Look, look--maybe it's microcebus (a mouse lemur)!"
"Ratus ratus"
"What?"
"It's a rat."
"Oh."
So much for years of primate behavior classes, a degree in anthropology, and several years experience in primate research...I'd just mistaken a rat for a lemur. Fortunately I redeemed myself a few minutes later by finding an actual microcebus. There are 2 species of microcebus at Ankarafantsika, one of which was so recently discovered, it doesn't even appear in the "Lemurs of Madagascar" field guide. There was one just above me, blinking the the light, before it hopped onto a higher branch with a quick jerky motion. I shouldn't have vorried, because soon everyone was spotting lemurs left and right--microcebus as well as avahi and lepilemur. We ended up finding 13 lemurs the first night and 22 the second night, for a total of 6 species! In addition to lemurs, we caught in our headlights beautiful birds, chameleons, and geckos...oh yeah, and rats. We see so little on our day hikes, but the forest is amazingly alive at night. Sometimes I wonder if we've got it all backwards--maybe we should sleep away the hot days and spend nights in the forest.