Madagascar

From nose to tail, Brookesia minima stands less than 2cm long. Many creatures are smaller, countless insects and other invertebrates, but B. minima is a fully fledged reptile.

Probably the world's smallest chameleon - undiscovered species may be smaller - the dwarf chameleon's insignificant frame hides a pair of lungs, a brain, and a tiny heart. They are miniature ambush predators, slowly stalking through their monopoly-board sized leaf-litter territories, changing colour as they go. When prey is sighted, usually a fruit fly, B. minima angles both its independantly-controlled eyes forward, quickly judging distance. Despite their famed reflexes, few fruit flies can outmaneuver a B. minima's tongue, which grabs the fly before retracting it into its mouth, where it is greeted by a row of tiny teeth.

Brookesia minima is just one of the wonders of Madagascar's forests. Isolated since the time of the dinosaurs, Madagascar has a unique flora and fauna. Over 90% of its known species are found nowhere else. This includes the lemurs, a group of around one hundred primate species, most of which have been discovered in the last 20 years. Madagascar's lemurs are preyed upon by the fossa, an enigmatic if ugly relative of the weasel.

In Madagascar, geckos impersonate bark, insects impersonate lichen, and chameleons impersonate their surroundings. Aye-ayes fulfill the roll of woodpeckers, rodents fulfill the roll of rabbits, and tenrecs fulfill the roll of just about everything else. Malagasy evolution has ripped the rulebook in two, resulting in primevally odd creatures whose strangeness is only enhanced by Madagascar's unearthly landscapes.

A new BBC wildlife documentary series, Madagascar, is debuting tonight on BBC Two tonight at 8pm. As with all flagship BBC nature documentaries, the series will doubtless be cinematographically flawless, tell the island's story fluently, and leave the viewer awed.

Madagascar, though, is a conservationists worst nightmare. I was lucky enough to visit the Indian Ocean nation in 2008 and certainly left with a feeling of awe but this was tainted by another emotion: horror. Madagascar's conservation situation is truly dire.

A transport map of Madagascar would look like a wheel. The major towns and tourist sights are all dotted around the country's edge except for the capitol, Antananarivo (I did not lean on my keyboard there, that is really how it is spelled). To reach the edge, travelers must either negotiate miles of potholed dirt track or fly. Each flight, regardless of the destination, takes roughly an hour and the view from the window is as follows:

1) Five minutes of Antananarivo suburbs.
2) Fifty minutes of scorched red soil.
3) Five minutes of pristine forest.

All of Madagascar was once forested but its center is now as barren and red as Australia's great central desert. Slash and Burn agriculture has stripped the land bare, leaving only the native's sacred Baobab trees. The Baobabs of Baobab Avenue, a famed tourist beauty spot, only stand alone because the rest of the forest was felled for rice paddies. A previous BBC Documentary, Planet Earth no less, made no mention of this in a memorable sequence where a balloon-mounted camera drifted between the Baobabs.

Deforestation leaves nothing to stabilise the dry soil. Five years on, the land is either covered by a rampant non-native grass species or gone. Erosion in Madagascar is rapid and catastrophic; canyons often open within days. Red tsingy, a geological feature proudly displayed to tourists, may look as old as time but is in fact an erosional feature present only due to recent deforestation.

Madagascar's wildlife faces is facing a point of no return. It needs more than just another blue-chip documentary  highlighting its unique flora and fauna, something to show generations when it is gone. It needs a documentary that highlights the peril the country's wildlife faces, shows why it is worth saving, and can be used as a weapon to help halt biodiversity loss.

I will be watching tonight hoping that the BBC have produced such a weapon and not simply dismissed the conservationists message as something that diminishes valuable ratings.

Does a picture say the right thousand words?

Time to spout an old cliché. If you have heard it once you have heard it a thousand times. An image really does say a thousand words.

There is though a problem with this cliché. If I were to show the image above - which shows the River Severn on its way to freezing in central Worcester for the first time in at least 30 years - to a group of people it would undoubtedly say different things to each of them.

Imagine the group contained Jill, the archetypal climate change activist, and Jeremy, a supercar-driving climate change skeptic. (Jeremy's personality and name, you understand, lends nothing to any famous climate change skeptics you may be thinking of)

Jill, through daisy-woven dreadlocks and a haze of scented candle smoke, might stare tearfully at the image before reaching to her guitar and improvising a ditty lamenting the rarity of true winters in our warming world.

Jeremy, meanwhile, would scoff. Ice, he might add, boastfully, as if stumbling upon a profound yet original thought, only forms when it is cold! When Peter took this image it was minus ten every night for a week! How can the world be warming, ridiculous?!?

Our prejudices inform how we interpret images. A two million year old South African hominid would look at an image of an eagle with fear. Eagles, after all, preyed upon their children.

If we fast forward to the 13th Century, the eagle has become the king of birds, fear has been transformed to reverence. Eagles are able to rejuvenate themselves by flying directly into the sun before rising, phoenix-like, from the flames.

Now eagles are pests or conservation symbols, a product of evolution or one of god's mightiest creations. Viewpoint is everything.

This eagle though is not wild, and neither was the one in the previous photograph. He is owned and flown daily by a man who cares deeply for it. Suddenly, just with a few words, the eagle has become a beloved pet or a cruelly-held captive animal.

Whereas, though, most dog walkers simply walk, feed, care for, and love their pets, this eagle has a further purpose. The owner hunts with the eagle, flying it at wild hares. Sometimes it kills, sometimes it does not.

Now, to some people, the eagle is the sinister tool of a bloodsport; to others it is a rare opportunity to view a predator in action at close quarters; to yet more it is a pest control agent. Again, this has changed all with the application of just a few more words.

Where then does this leave conservation photography and natural history film-making if people tend to see their own prejudices in images and film? How do we know if the thousand words an image says are the ones we mean it to? Are conservation and educational images redundant, powerless to change people's perceptions?

Not at all, far from it. A carefully chosen image, a skillfully applied sentence, or (on film) a well chosen soundtrack, can bypass prejudice and bring out new emotions, making people laugh and cry on cue, sharing the emotions of the artist.

The challenge is to understand the perceptions of others and to chose those images, words, and sounds that affect your target audience in the same way they affect you, getting your message across as strongly as possible. The only real way to test this though is to show someone the final product and to ask them to explain, in a thousand words, what it means to them.

Note: The proof is in the pudding. Straight after this post I logged onto facebook, finding a link to this article showing that The Cove, a powerful conservation film, is starting to influence a modest but growing protest movement in Japan:

http://savejapandolphins.org/blog/post/some-good-news-a-demonstration-by-japanese-in-taiji-against-the-dolphin-sla

An announcement

When I tell people my plans for next year, I invariably get one of two reactions. People either remark that Forest Gump did something similar, or slowly back off, fixing me with confused and hostile gazes, wondering where the nearest straightjacket is and how to get me into it.

So which of Forest Gump's exploits am I so crazily going to replicate? Will I be joining the American army to fight a pointless war abroad? Perhaps I am going to run into a soon-to-be bombed forest to save the life of an ungrateful man. Or maybe I am going Shrimp fishing in a hurricane with a man with no legs?

Not quite. Even I am not quite that crazy.

Instead, I will be walking 5000 miles for charity, crossing 17 American states, leaving the Georgia's Atlantic coast on Valentine's Day 2011, and arriving nine and a half months later at the Pacific coast of Washington State.

Now I know what you are thinking; Forest Gump did not walk across America. True, but he did run across large amount of it. Lots of times. Close enough.

So how did this come about? Well one day, my old Keblite friend, and rather amusing blogger, Joe O'Connor called me, explaining his desire to pen a mammoth adventure book, preferably with someone capable of occasionally taking a professional quality image. I am not sure why he chose me, and am even less sure why I said yes, but for whatever reason I agreed and the planning began.

During that rather lengthy phone call, we hammered out a route, quickly dismissing the organised transamerican hiking trails, preferring instead to play a transcontinental game of join-the-dots. We will connect a series of points that especially interest us, spending time on parts of the Appalachian Trail, the American Discovery trail, and the Pacific Crest trail in between.

We will visit the Great Smokey Mountains, Gatlinburg Tennessee, the world's longest cave system, St Louis, Kansas City, Lake Oahe, the South Dakotan Badlands, the Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument, Yellowstone, The Grand Tetons, the Great Sandy Desert, Crater Lake, and Mount Hood to name but a few.

We be soaked by thunderstorms, endure freezing temperatures, relentless heat, gale force winds, snow, and ice. Our feet will blister, or legs will ache, and our minds may break. Nevertheless, somewhere along the way, we will meet amazing people and see hundreds of ordinary and extraordinary sights.

Neither of us have done anything like this before. It will not be easy, and we will probably never speak to each other again. But, when it is done, we will almost certainly look back at it as one of the defining and most rewarding achievements of our lives.

Right now I am living a brilliant life, spending my days in the countryside taking countless photographs, but to be perfectly honest, I simply cannot wait to get going.

One last very important point. There is a serious reason behind this. It is not just Joe and I waltzing across a continent avoiding the real world by walking across as much of it as possible. We both aim to raise seriously respectable wedges of cash, be it dollars or pounds, for our respective charities.

I have put a great deal of thought into the charity I will represent. My main passion is wildlife, but I recognise that a heartfelt wildlife only approach to conservation is simply not feasible in the modern world. Successful conservation initiatives almost always involve the local community and cutting edge ecological science.

Until recently, I have been at loss to find a charity that exclusively backs exactly this kind of modern conservation. That is until the BBC Wildlife Fund popped up with their Wild Night In.

The BBC Wildlife Fund funds exactly the kind of conservation I am passionate about. They seek out projects worldwide that draw upon cutting edge science and enterprising passionate individuals to protect flagship species, help the local community, and conserve the environment as a hole. They truly make a difference.

I have just donated a small amount via the fund's Justgiving page, and would urge you to do the same, whether spurred on by our walk or not.

Oh, and we have a name for our adventure. "The Great Walk West: Being British Across America." I shall keep you posted.

Gone but not forgotten

Many of you will have heard of the Golden Toad, the Passenger Pigeon, the Tasmanian Tiger, the Great Auk, the Quagga, and the Stephens Island Wren.

All of these animals are extinct, all within the last 250 years, and all (except perhaps the Golden Toad) almost entirely due to the actions of humans.

These species were all lost in distant parts of the world or, in the case of the European Great Auk, generations ago. These names, although familiar to us, seem to resonate with times and places other than our own.

Perhaps this is why so many seem immune to the pleas of conservationists citing examples such as these as evidence for our continued detrimental effect upon the environment. Extinction seems to be a remote phenomenon not directly affected by the actions of modern Brits.

Maybe this would be different if we had recently lost a species of our own, if we had an example of an endemic British species recently lost due to the actions of modern Brits.

Well as a matter of fact we do.

I was shocked to read in this months BBC wildlife magazine of the Ivell's Sea Anemone - a species endemic to Britain that became extinct as recently as 1983. Even as someone who has completed a degree in Biology, with modules on British marine ecology, the name was completely unfamiliar to me.

It is obviously a terrible shame, perhaps even criminal, that the Ivell's Sea Anemone is gone for good, but why are conservationists not using the name to their advantage? What are they not shouting on rooftops that the Scottish Wild Cat, the Red Squirrel, and the Smooth Snake are in danger of going the same was as the Ivell's Sea Anemone? Why is every British school child not taught to say its name and lament its loss?

In a time when the general opinion is that the environment can wait in the face of larger challenges such as economic recovery, perhaps the Ivell's Sea Anemone should be used to remind us Brits that the environment is as much our responsibility as that of the rainforest-felling third world dictatorships we so love to condemn and patronize.