Mandena Conservation Zone

Last week I emailed the lady in charge of biodiversity to ask if I could visit the conservation area that QMM/Rio Tinto has established here in Ft Dauphin. I didn't hear back for a while....then she called me on Friday and asked if I wanted to go on Saturday. Of course I said yes and then she arranged for a guy named Philo (whom I hadn't met before) to be my guide.

I picked Philo up Saturday morning and we drove to the conservation zone which is right next to the mine. This area is one of the very few remaining areas that is still forested.

The first thing he showed me was their nursery where the keep all the seeds and grow the plants. Pretty interesting, including a carnivorous plant(not a venus fly trap, but one that has kind of a pitcher to catch stuff in). I didn't feed it anything.

Then we kind of went on a walk through the forest and he showed me different plants that are endemic to the area, etc. There are some crocodiles and lemurs but we didn't see any. They have some fossa in a cage. Fossa are the "lions" of Madagascar. They are the main predator of lemurs, etc.

While we were walking I saw a small hole on the trail and I thought it was a leave sticking out of it. Philo got really excited and pulled it out of the ground and it was a chameleon. It had changed color to match the dark earth around it. In the pic it's green, but it was actually dark grey when we first picked it up.

We saw some birds, bugs, etc, etc and some guy just carrying a big piece of meat in his hand.......

It's an interesting area to go and see what Madagascar was like 50 years ago before the forests were all destroyed.