Toliara
We were happy to head north from Toliara and leave the crowds behind. It's crazy to see freight trucks, cars, bicycle rickshaws and pedestrians all sharing the same space.
We crossed the Fiherenana River, which was mostly just a wide expanse of sand. It was the end of the dry season, but we knew rain had started falling where we had just been further north. Lova said the river had flooded two meters deep two years before, and people in Toliara were living on their roofs.
Lova said some canoeists told him two days ago that the season (on the Manambolo River) was closed. The road south from Belo is now impassable because of flooding due to the recent rain. I guess we timed that just right...
We passed a convoy of zebu carts hauling canoes to Toliara for sale. The canoes are carved out of Balsa wood.
There were some ponds by the side of the road as we drove north; they were bright pink, caused by algae. We saw Black-winged Stilts, Kitlitz's Plovers, Curlew Sandpipers, and a Madagascar Harrier Hawk.
The Reniala Forest is a small reserve that lies just beyond Tortise Village. Like Tortise Village, it is a small area, covering only about 60 hectares (~150 acres). However, within that 60 hectares of native spiny forest is a wonderful diversity of life.
We dropped our gear at Trois Makis, a small facility at Renaila Forest Reserve. Then we took a guided walk in the reserve. We had one official guide, and a guide's helper. In Madagascar there are some kind of requirements to be an official guide, one of which is speaking English. On several occasions the guide's helper seemed to be better at finding animals than the guide, but because he couldn't speak English he wasn't yet an official guide. Our guide's name was Rhilemon; I forgot to write down his helper's name.
The reserve has many giant baobabs, Adansonia rubostipa, one of the stranger looking trees on the planet. Our guide, Rhilemon, told us that "Rani" is the Malagasy word for "mother," and "Ala" is the word for "forest." The local name for the giant baobab is "renaila," and the reserve takes its name from the phrase "reny ala" which means "mother of the forest." Indeed, some of these beasts are over 1,000 years old.
Rhilemon told us the baobab is not really a tree, but a giant succulent. However, the term succulent is not a taxonomic category; a baobab is actually tree which is also a succulent.
Rhilemon said that the area gets 540mm of moisture annually, which seemed high to me. Toliara gets 297mm, and I would expect Renaila to be about the same.
The first bird we saw was a Madagascar Nightjar; I was surprised to see it out during the day.
The fony baobab has orange and yellow flowers which open only at night, and are open only one day a year. The flowers appear while the tree is in leaf, unlike some of the trees we saw in Namibia which flowered when they weren't in leaf. The trees don't produce fruit until they are about 100 years old. The tree grows about 12mm in width per year, and can get up to 15m tall. According to Rhilemon, the trees "grow up to their maximum height, then just get bigger."
There were also many "False Baobabs" which Rhilemon showed us could be identified by their "chicken feet," roots that protrude like mini-buttresses at their base.
Since it was the middle of the day, not many critters were out, but we did see a few geckos.
There was a huge diversity of plants in the forest; Dona kept track of them better than I did, but I don't have most of them identified.
We went for a night walk as well, always a treat. Crickets, scorpions, big spiders, snakes... what's not to like?
The big treat on our night walk was a Tenrec, a small mammal that looks (in this case) like a hedgehog / echidna / porcupine but isn't. There are a boatload of different Tenrec species on Madagascar, all descended from a single ancestral species via adaptive radiation. There are more different species in wetter areas than in dry ones. I haven't a clue which one we saw, but it was pretty cool.
The next morning we went for another walk, with the same guides. Because of the earlier hour, we saw quite a few more birds than we had the day before.
There were some red-fronted brown lemurs around also.
Before we left the Reniala Forest Reserve, we happened to meet the reserve coordinator, Onja Razef. She said they needed help releasing lemurs into the wild and re-conditioning them to the wild. That sounds like a fun project, if that happens to be one of your areas of expertise. Unfortunately, I don't know squat about it...
