I spent 8 weeks from July to September 2007 volunteering for Lemur Venture. As volunteers, we spent time in the bush collecting data about lemur numbers and behaviour. We were led by Matthew Banks, a primatologist from Stony Brook University, USA. The data we collected is for use in captive breeding programmes and reforestation efforts as well as by researchers trying to better understand Madagascar's complex ecosystems.

First we had a period of orientation where we learnt more about [Azafady’s] conservation goals and the work we would be doing on Lemur Venture……… we received our first Malagasy lessons and a crash course on `fady' (taboo) and `fomba' (customs), then we headed out to the spiny forests of Ifotaka. From there we went to the littoral forests of St Luce.

Our work was primarily lemur censusing and botanical surveying. We walked transects (3 km paths with positional markers every 25 metres) every morning and recorded data for every lemur group seen. This data was augmented by point counts, where we sat on the high ridges and noted down any activity we saw, and will be used with a statistical model to estimate lemur populations in the area. The highlight of our time there was the night walks, where we walked the transects looking for the nocturnal lemurs. The researchers were specifically interested in botany and feeding behaviour and our third task was to help with a botanical survey - sampling random 4x4m squares and cataloguing every plant in them. There was also a brief habituation exercise towards the end, where we tried to get within a few metres without scaring the sifakas away - close enough to see what they eat.

Our second stint in the bush was in an area called St Luce. This used to be one big littoral forest, but due to slash and burn agriculture it is now 17 fragments, the largest of which is 3km long and around 1.5km across. To make things more complicated, there is ilmenite in the sand, and [a mining company] is going to be extracting for production of titanium dioxide, a major industrial whitener. Their plan is to preserve the two largest fragments and dig up the rest. This is due to happen in around 15 years time. Azafady are doing an independent impact study. The big question, which no-one seems to know the answer to, is how interdependent the forest fragments are. For example, do lemur groups cross over between fragments, and does this affect the gene pool they have at their disposal? The lemur species we studied here, Collared Brown Lemur, is active both day and night and its home range is still unclear. It’s also unclear where exactly they get their nutrition from. Our botany study here suggests that the different fragments have quite different tree types, depending on how close they are to the sea or the estuary and their elevation. These trees also bear fruit in different seasons, which means that the food available in different fragments is not necessarily the same in any season. PBZT (Parc Botanique et Zoologique de Tsimbazaza – Azafady partners) is very interested in the role of lemurs in forest regeneration. When lemurs eat a fruit, they don't bite the seeds; these get pooed out pretty much intact. PBZT is interested in comparing lemur poo germination rates with seeds from intact fruit. A lot of our work in St Luce involved following a group of lemurs around, identifying the trees they ate at, and collecting seed samples from their poo. We planted 25 seeds each from fruit and from poo for each plant type in the Azafady nursery at Ambandrika, and will get germination results shortly.

We stayed at four different campsites. Two of them were proper Azafady campsites at Lanirano (near Fort Dauphin) and Ambandrika (near St Luce), while the other two, on a dried riverbed in the spiny forests near Ifotaka and on the beach by the littoral fragment “S17”, were much more chaotic and fun. While the data collection work was often repetitive (lemurs don't really do very much most of the time), the forests and campsites were hardly ever dull. I reckon I saw on average three new birds or animals a day. Our campsites were visited by harrier hawks, kingfishers, lemurs and mongooses. Even without these visitors, we were quite a disparate bunch (only a third of us volunteers came with a background in conservation or anything related, and the local guides were all fantastic in very different ways) and sharing a campsite for eight weeks was an amazing experience for all of us.