Began the day with some breakfast (eggs and potatoes) cooked by our lovely cook / cleaner lady in their outdoor kitchen with some hot tea with milk.
Warning: I am an over-sharer. I am a little lactose sensitive so I normally don’t have milk, but I needed it to help me go to the toilet (if you know what I mean) because I had this fear of having to do a bush poo while we were out searching for lemurs. Luckily it did the trick and I was no longer in fear. I think the travel probiotic I got is doing it’s job VERY WELL.
I then had to get all my camera gear ready and my new little DJI Osmo 4 body cam to document our morning adventure. I had my Canon R7 Mirrorless with my trusty RF 100-400mm lens and also had my backup Canon EOS M6 Mark II (mirrorless) with random lenses in there just in case. The beauty of mirrorless cameras, they are so light, it’s easy to just pop into your backpack for backup/options.
We had our guide Princi and research student Joany take us into the forest in the hope to see some lemurs. We walked up and down through the rainforest for about 1.5 hours, fell in some mud, then we started to hear some other people (other guides and research students) making some excited noise and we raced up the hill and I finally saw my first wild lemur! I was so excited I grabbed and shook Princi’s arm (poor Princi haha).
It was a Diademed Sifaka, which are giant white fluffy things with long fluffy tails – they just didn’t look real! Then I headed up the hill more and one of the researchers was pointing at the tree and I noticed there was two then I just lost it. Emotion overload. Sooo I started crying like a baby hahahaha. The build-up of emotion and the anticipation took over, and the cry was like excitement/happiness/relief all rolled into one!
Then all three of them hopped away so I went with the research students and my trusty guide Princi and we went bush bashing up and down the mountain following the three sifakas and me attempting to get footage of them. This is the first time for me to be photographing in the wild, and these sifakas were HIIIIIGH UP in the trees, with strong winds and glary clouds. Not my ideal first experience haha – but we’ll see how the photos turned out (see photo below). We went travelling around with the sifakas for awhile then decided to head back since we’d left Debra back where we first spotted the lemurs.
We then made our way slowly back to camp, but we saw a giant worm on the way which Debra and I got VERY excited about, some Madagascar day geckoes and these invasive species plant that I’d just finished creating a poster for! So we made poor Princi pose pulling out these invasive plants which turns out was very hard to do haha.
Then we came back, ate some lunch (pork cutlets, veges, rice and potatoes) then we got the generator going so we could turn the starlink on and do some work with internet for a little bit. Debra was still very excited about the worm so we emailed Tim Eppley, Wildlife Madagascar’s Chief Conservation Officer to help us identify said worm. He replied with ‘I’m sorry to disappoint, but it just looks like a normal earthworm to me‘ the sent a photo of his friend actually holding a real giant worm (it was like the size of a thick rope) and Debra and I just lost it, we couldn’t stop laughing. We’re very sorry Tim hahaha
What a day! And tonight I’m heading out with the nocturnal lemur research students to help release one of their little mouse lemurs (AKA Mort) back into the rainforest.
More information on Diademed Sifaka (Propithecus diadema)
IUCN Red List: Diademed Sifaka
*A week after I left, apparently they spotted a baby diademed sifaka with these guys!
