Lemurs DO live in Madagascar!

So sorry about the lack of pictures, the internet/computer wasn't letting me load them, but if you want to see some photos, you can go to tagged pictures of me on facebook and that will let you in to the album called Madagasikara by Jesse Assael Berkowitz which has some really good ones on it.  Also you can go to zatosary.blogspot.com which is the blog of another girl on the trip, and she should have some pictures.  Hopefully I'll be able to get some up soon!!!  Missing everyone of you lots and lots!

We finally saw lemurs!  We drove 4 or 5 hours, again on the national highway, which makes Marshall Cove Road in the rainy spring season look like Route 1 (for any islanders),  but it was absolutely incredibly worth it.  Our trip took us to the dry spiny forest in the Androy region of Madagascar, which is north-west of our home base in Fort Dauphin.  There is actually a tree called named Roy (pronounced rewy), for which the people and the region are named, which is a very spiny bush-like tree that catches any bit of clothing or arms or legs that brush against it.  The area only gets 300-500 mm of rainfall on average each year, so it was incredibly hot and dry, but there was so much to the forest that we were exploring!
We set up our campsite in a little village which is part of the Ifotaka commune (40 km squared of 14 little villages), next to the Mandrare River, which was really more of a trickle because it’s one of the 10 months of dry season out of the year.  The villagers herd zebu and goats and sheep, grow manioc and corn and sweet potatoes, but this is one of the only regions that doesn’t have rice because it is so dry.  The campsite was in a grove of Euphorbia trees, which have a latex sap which can make you go blind if you get it in your eyes, but luckily there’s another medicinal plant that can take care of that.  We were just on the edge of the semi-protected area of the forest, so the first morning we went into the forest to find lemurs with some local guides, which are like lemur whisperers, I swear they know exactly where the groups are at all time.  We had only walked about 15 minutes gaping at the coolness of the plants, including aloe, another species of euphorbia that looked like part of a coral reef, and these really strange, tall, also coral-looking trees called Alloudia, and lots of baobabs, when we saw our first lemurs!  Sifaka lemurs, which are white and furry with black faces and travel in groups were the most prevalent in the forest, but we also saw some adorable nocturnal mouse lemurs and lepilemurs, which are much smaller and just hang out in the crook of Alloudia branches during the day.
The lemurs are so incredibly cute!  If they don’t mind the fact that you’re there, they just hang out and eat the flowers which grow on the tops of the Alloudia trees, or leaves off of some other tree species, but if they are bothered by you, they hop away, almost flying from tree to tree, much more gracefully than squirrels, and bouncier than birds if that makes any sense at all.  We saw some mother lemurs with their little babies on their backs, which was fantastically adorable. The babies just hang on to the mother's back or stomach as they jump from tree to tree or hop on the ground.
We did three different studies, one of population density, one of behavior, and one of habitat, which all basically involved trekking through the spiny forest trying not to get to scraped up or drown in our own sweat because it was so hot, and then finding and following different lemur groups.  It was really amazing to follow the local guides around and get experience doing field work, especially because the lemurs calmed down and actually let us watch them for hours!
I also ran in the morning on the "road," and some local villagers who were bringing things to the market stopped and laughed and pointed and kind of gave encouraging sounds (I think, hopefully that's just not my absurd faith in humanity coming out), which was fun and funny.  It's so easy to connect with the local people doing things like that, or just mirroring the little kids until it becomes a little game or dance, which they really love.  In some ways the language barrier is so frustrating because you can't talk in depth with people enough to get down to their character or any abstract beliefs without a translator, but in other ways you don't need language at all, besides laughing and motioning with your hands.  Some girls in the fruit market where we stop frequently got really into it, and we were dancing around and laughing for such a long time, which was really adorable.