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BBC Four Collections -
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specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.
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For this Collection, Sir David Attenborough
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has chosen documentaries from the start of his career.
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More programmes on this theme
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and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.
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MALAGASY VALIHA MUSIC
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Madagascar was once covered by forest.
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But during the course of centuries, the Malagasy,
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the local people, have cut down much of those forests
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with the results that a place for animals to live is much reduced.
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But there still remain patches of forest here and there.
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And up here in the northwest, there is a particularly big patch
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and, what is more, a large lake.
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'We pitched camp by the lake shore.
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'With us we had as guide and interpreter George,
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'a scientific assistant from the Research Institute of Madagascar.
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'The lake was a magnificent sight.' RAUCOUS BIRD CALLS
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Every morning, these enormous flocks of flamingos arrived,
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turning the waters of the lake rosy pink with their reflections.
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There were two species of flamingo here.
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The greater flamingo,
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stalking haughtily in the middle of the picture,
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and the smaller lesser flamingo, in the foreground.
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The two birds differ not only in size but in their feeding habits.
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The greater flamingo
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dredging through the mud in search of tiny animals.
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The lesser flamingo, which has a heavier bill,
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feeding on microscopic plants,
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algae, which float in the top two inches of water.
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The two species, therefore,
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when living together on the same lake,
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are not competing for the same food.
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However, both use roughly the same method of feeding.
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Their beaks contain rows of plates
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and by a pumping action in their throat,
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they suck a continuous stream of water through these plates
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which sieve out the particles of food
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and then they expel the water through the sides of the beak.
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The lake is very salty and brackish
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and quite unfit for us to use as drinking water
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but for the flamingos it was perfect.
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Rich in tiny shrimps and algae, shallow and, what is more,
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mirror smooth, which is important for if the water's choppy,
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waves splash the birds' faces and nostrils
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and they can't feed properly.
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Both these species of flamingo
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are also found in the great lakes of the East African Rift Valley.
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But it's only in the last few years that their African breeding grounds
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were discovered on the baking salt flats of one or two
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remote lakes in Northern Tanganyika.
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But where do these flocks come from?
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Had they migrated from East Africa 250 miles away -
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for flamingos are known to undertake long migratory flights -
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or are they a special separate population
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which spend all their lives in Madagascar?
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If that's the case, where do they nest? No-one could tell us.
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We had arrived at the season when most birds were nesting
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and in the next few months, whenever we were anywhere near a lake,
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we went out of our way to visit it in the hope of finding flamingo nests
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or at least hearing reports of them.
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We never found the answer to any of our questions.
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Perhaps the birds didn't nest at all that year.
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Apparently, flamingos in the tropics
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don't necessarily always breed every 12 months.
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But the sight of this magnificent flock was one I shall never forget.
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There were many other birds, both on the lake
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'and in the woodland around its shores,
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'and the large tree beneath which we had camped'
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proved to be the home of a pair of hoopoe.
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The male spent his morning hunting industriously for small insects.
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For, like the hornbill to which he is related,
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he feeds the female as she sits brooding on the eggs.
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PIPING, CHIRRUPING BIRDSONG
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The nest was hidden in the bottom of this hole in the tree,
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but I'm afraid the presence of our camp made him very nervous
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and he seemed to find it difficult to make up his mind
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whether or not to go down to his mate.
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Even now, he lost his courage halfway
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and popped out of a hole on the other side,
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still holding the insects in his beak
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to make quite sure that all was well.
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But this time his mate did get her food.
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Both flamingos and hoopoes are relatively familiar birds.
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But this odd creature was quite new to me.
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It was hopping across the marshy ground close to the lake shore.
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And to begin with, I couldn't make out what it was doing.
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When it closed its wings,
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it was easy to see that it was a species of black heron.
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But why should it behave in this curious fashion?
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Was it perhaps some form of display?
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Then I realised what it was doing.
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It was fishing.
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In order to see if there were any fish in the water close by,
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it was shading its eyes with its wings,
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exactly as we sometimes do with our hands in order to look into a pool
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and cut out the reflections from the surface of the water.
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Birds were obviously abundant, the air was full of their calls,
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but on a smaller scale,
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there was a vast population of insects of one sort and another,
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constantly and ceaselessly active.
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The dusty earth,
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immediately outside the disused hut we eventually took over,
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was studded with these small pits.
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They're traps laid by a savage little creature called an antlion.
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He himself lies buried out of sight at the bottom of the pit
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but when he senses some activity,
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an ant, perhaps, crawling around the sides of the pit,
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he starts snapping back his head,
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shooting up grains of sand to try and knock down
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the unwary intruder, rather like an anti-aircraft gun shooting at planes.
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His aim's not very accurate but his missiles of sand grains
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usually provoke miniature landslides
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in the loose dust of the sides of the pit.
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As a result, the ant loses its footing
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and tumbles down to the bottom.
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Just as this one is doing.
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The antlion concealed beneath the sand is waiting for it
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with his jaws agape.
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Once he's got it, there's no escape for the ant
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and it's dragged below the sand and, there, sucked dry.
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But, so far, I hadn't seen this cunning monster.
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Here he is. In fact, he's only a larva.
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Soon he will change into his adult shape, rather like a dragonfly,
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and will fly away to find a mate.
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But the antlion was only one insect with which we shared our hut.
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On the wall above me, mud wasps were busy building their cells.
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BUZZING
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Every three or four minutes,
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the female wasp arrived with a ball of mud
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which she had gathered from a puddle by the lakeside.
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Mixed with her spittle, the mud makes a first-rate building material
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which she kneads carefully into shape, using her antennae
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to help in checking on the thickness of the wall.
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The cells she was making was not a home
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but a chamber which will serve both as a cradle and as a tomb.
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When the walls are almost complete, she will catch a small spider,
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paralyse it with her sting, and carry it to this nest.
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Then she will lay her egg on the still living but inert spider,
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and, with more mud, seal up the hole in the chamber.
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In a short time, the young wasp grub will hatch and find fresh meat,
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indeed, living meat, close at hand.
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It will feed on the helpless spider's body until it's full-grown.
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Then it'll change into a wasp, bite a hole in the mud wall of its cradle,
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and fly off to begin the cycle all over again.
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The female completed a cell like this in a mere two or three hours.
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And she made at least one new one every day.
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But of all the insects in Madagascar, the most gorgeous
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and the most famous are its moths,
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some of which fly during the daytime
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and are as resplendently beautiful
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as the most brilliant butterflies in the world.
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This is the silver, almost metallic-looking cocoon,
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of one of the most handsome of them, the comet moth.
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EERIE MUSIC
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The strange, wet, wormlike creature struggling out into the world
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bears little resemblance to the magnificent insect into which
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it will turn within the short space of half an hour.
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Its wings are no more than limp, yellowish flaps,
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and, as it hangs from the cocoon, it's whole body throbs and pulsates.
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It gulps in air.
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And slowly its body swells.
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At this moment, its wings are hollow sacks.
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But now, as its body fills with air,
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its blood is being forced down the veins of
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the crumpled wings so that slowly, as we watched,
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they began to expand and to change,
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losing their bag-like shape
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and stretching so that the upper and lower surfaces
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come closer and closer together.
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First, the handsome sulphur-yellow forewings begin to grow.
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The brown blotches on them swelling into handsome circles.
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But both wings are not growing at an equal rate.
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Watch the wing on the right,
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as it imperceptibly increases
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in size and length,
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expanding downwards.
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A quarter of an hour has passed.
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And the forewings are almost fully developed,
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though still wet and comparatively limp.
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Now the pennant tails of the hind wings begin slowly to lengthen.
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At the end of an hour,
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the moth has completed its miraculous transformation
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and hangs in all its glory,
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the membranes of its wings slowly hardening,
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its wingspan a full seven inches.
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This is a male, with the long pennant tails to its hind wings,
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and the female hangs on the right, with smaller, stouter pennants.
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Two of the most beautiful moths in the world.
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But our main quarry were the lemurs and here in the northwest,
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we were in the territory where brown lemurs live.
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They're becoming increasingly rare and the Madagascan government
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has passed laws making it illegal for them to be caught.
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But in the middle of the forest, we came across this trap.
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The poachers had made the clearing and stretched these poles across it.
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They knew that the lemurs hate coming down to the ground
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and will certainly prefer to cross the clearing
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by running along the poles.
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When they do, they will enter this noose
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and there hang until they're slaughtered and eaten.
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LEMURS HOWL AND GRUNT
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There they were.
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BIRDS CHIRP
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LEMURS GRUNT
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LEMURS GRUNT AND BARK
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LEMURS HOWL
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They were the size of small cats, with dark brown faces
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and lighter brown fur.
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And they showed their anxiety with their strange, gruff cries.
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Though they have hands and feet, like those of a monkey,
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the way they ran through the trees reminded me not of a monkey at all
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but of some quite different creature, like, perhaps, a marten.
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Their tails are not prehensile
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but they seem to use them as a help in keeping their balance.
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And they also wagged them when they were annoyed or excited.
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LEMURS CONTINUE TO GRUNT AND HOWL
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LEMURS HOWL AND CHIRRUP
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And here is a female with a young baby clinging to her back
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and having a pretty rough ride.
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Brown lemurs nearly always produce only a single baby,
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very rarely twins and never three or more, and you can quite see why.
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There just wouldn't be room.
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There was a whole troop of them
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crossing through the trees above our heads.
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We followed them and soon discovered where they were going -
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to a mango tree for their afternoon feed.
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But in that position,
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I didn't see how the baby would get anything to eat at all.
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Although most of them were feasting on the yellow, juicy mangoes,
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some were eating other things as well.
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This one was stripping bark from a young branch.
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LEMURS CHIRRUP
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And this one had found the nest of wild bees
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and was stealing the honey.
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When their meal was over, they retired to another tree
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and there they began carefully to clean themselves.
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LEMURS GRUNT, BARK AND HOWL
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Their name, lemurs, is not a local Madagascan name,
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but is taken straight from the Latin word "lemures", which means "ghosts".
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No-one knows who gave it to them or even exactly why it was given.
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Perhaps because some of them are nocturnal,
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perhaps because some of them make the most weird howling cries,
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or even more likely because some of the local tribes believe them
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to be the incarnations of spirits of the dead.
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Unfortunately, this belief isn't held by the people in this area
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and, as we'd seen, they still trapped them for food.
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The meal and their toilet finished, they made off.
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The really small babies legitimately travel on the backs of their mothers.
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But one of the half-grown ones seemed to reckon that
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he was still young enough to be entitled to a ride.
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Mother clearly didn't agree.
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But I think the youngster won in the end.
253
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But all lemurs are not brown.
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And this is the most handsome and strikingly coloured species of all -
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the magnificent ruffed lemur, nearly four feet long,
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now, sadly, increasingly rare.
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I know of no certain explanation for this startling
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black-and-white colouring, so like that of a giant panda.
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However, whereas the drab brown lemur is active during the day,
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this ruffed lemur is mostly nocturnal.
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And many animals that only come out at night are coloured
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black and white, like the badger, or the skunk.
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Perhaps so that they can readily see and recognise one another
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when it's dark.
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Actually, the colouring of this creature is very variable.
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The markings are not always the same shape and sometimes the patches
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that are white in this one are, in others, a handsome reddish gold.
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The lemurs, with their fox-like faces
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and their human-like hands and feet,
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belong to the group of primates,
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the group which contains monkeys, apes and man himself.
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But the lemurs are more primitive than any of these other families
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and appeared much earlier in geological history.
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In fact, millions of years ago, there were many more types of lemur
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than there are found today, including a monster that was almost
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the size of the donkey,
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which, since it presumably had a long, furry tail,
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must have been a really strange beast.
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But of all the surviving species, this is, I think, the most handsome.
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This is the third type of lemur, the ring-tailed lemur.
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Come on.
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The other name for the ring-tailed lemur,
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this beautiful silver and grey animal, is the cat lemur.
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And when I first heard the cat lemur as a name,
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I couldn't see why it should be applied to this particular animal.
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After all, although they are the size of cats,
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they don't really look like cats.
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But as soon as I started to keep them as pets,
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I soon discovered why they should be called cat lemurs.
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Apart from this passion which they have for licking -
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they never stop licking...
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either me, or themselves, or one another...
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Apart from this passion for licking, they have...
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Whoops. ..they have several other really very cat-like features.
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They purr.
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And although it's not a loud purr, it's a very distinctive purr
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and you couldn't call it anything else but a purr.
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And that in itself would be...
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Oh, dear. Oh, dear. What?
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And that... And that in itself
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is sufficiently cat-like because they meow...
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Where are you going? But their diet is not at all cat-like.
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In fact, they're vegetarians. See what you think of this, boys.
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Mm?
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Grapes. Now, watch how he eats, holding his mouth up
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so that he doesn't miss a single drop of the juice.
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In the wild, they eat the fleshy cactus-like plants which grow
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in the southwest of Madagascar.
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What about this? Would you like some of this?
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But they are very, very...
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easy to feed because they will accept... That's my finger!
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They will accept a wide variety of different sorts of food.
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Would you like that?
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All right, well, I've got some more grapes. Hang on.
315
00:25:09,400 --> 00:25:12,040
Uh... No, look, here.
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And I've fed mine on boiled potatoes, which they love,
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and cabbage,
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and grapes. And when I can't get grapes,
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sultanas, and dried prunes, and lettuce, and carrots.
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Here, come on. They are not really tree creatures.
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They...they live in the southwest, and they live mostly on the ground
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amongst the wild, rocky desert that there is down there.
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Even so, they've got these grasping hands,
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which are so typical of all lemurs,
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and they've got these forward-pointing eyes,
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which give them an almost human expression.
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And, for me, they are some of the loveliest of all animals.
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If these, in fact, are the equivalent of cats,
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then you might also say that there are monkey lemurs,
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like, for example, the brown lemurs,
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and there are also squirrel lemurs,
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and...
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mouse lemurs. Indeed, there are 20 different sorts of lemurs,
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and, extraordinarily enough, they are all restricted to Madagascar.
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Only some very remote relatives,
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the bushbaby and the potto in Africa,
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and the loris in Asia, those are the only other close relatives
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which they have in the world.
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This, of course, is a very extraordinary distribution.
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And the reason is that Madagascar for the lemurs
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is what Australia is to the pouched animals, to the marsupials.
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In past geological time,
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there was a period when the higher animals had not yet developed.
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Uh... But the lemurs were there.
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And they spread over many parts of the Earth.
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And fossil lemurs are found in Europe...
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Here.
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00:27:06,280 --> 00:27:10,200
Fossil lemurs are found in Europe and, indeed, in North Africa.
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But then more modern and more efficient types of animals developed.
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The true rats, the true mice, the true squirrels,
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the true monkeys, and they were more efficient than the lemurs.
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And, as a result, the lemurs died out over much of the world.
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But before those new types of animals developed,
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the island of Madagascar
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had got split off from the main continent of Africa.
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So...the lemurs...
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It's difficult to talk about serious natural history
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00:27:44,080 --> 00:27:45,480
with this on your shoulder.
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So the lemurs...
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Oi, have this.
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00:27:49,960 --> 00:27:51,120
Have that.
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00:27:52,680 --> 00:27:55,080
As I was saying...
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00:27:55,080 --> 00:27:56,600
You don't want any more.
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00:27:56,600 --> 00:28:01,160
As I was saying, the lemurs remained safe in Madagascar
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because the island got split off from the rest of the continent
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and the more modern animals never reached there.
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But I, for one, am delighted that they managed to survive in Madagascar
368
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because they are really the most charming animal, aren't you?
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But there is one lemur I haven't yet mentioned.
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That's the sort of lemur attempt at an ape.
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It's the biggest of all the lemurs. It's one of the least known.
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It's very rare. And its name... Excuse me.
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Its name is the indris.
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It lives only in the tropical rainforests
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which extend for a small strip down the east coast.
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Wonderful places with these great tree ferns, but not the best place
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to go looking for animals because the vegetation is so very thick.
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00:29:00,680 --> 00:29:03,840
But how we got on in our search for the indris
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I'll tell you about next time.
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MALAGASY VALIHA MUSIC
32449
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