A Conspiracy of Lemurs - Turning a Conservation Dream Into Reality

Embryo of an Idea

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

— C.P Cavafy, “Ithaka”

Let me start at the beginning. Well, sort of. I’ll warn you now that there will be time travel in this telling, as I excavate memories from my own personal serpentine and the evolution of the lemur reserve, both. Milestones laid down in broad chronological brush strokes will be circled back to in later chapters, with more detail about the people involved and those endeavors we undertook.

It was January 1993. I had just finished leading a safari in Tanzania for the American Museum of Natural History (from here on referred to alternately as the Museum or AMNH). Since I would be “in the neighborhood,” my boss in New York dispatched me on an inspection trip to the immense island east of the African mainland. Our department, the Museum’s educational-travel program, was organizing an around-the-world expedition by private jet that would include a short stay in Madagascar and we needed to ensure that high-quality services could be guaranteed. I was to interview potential guides, document hotels and restaurants, assess road conditions, organize rental vehicles, and the like.

I loved forging new frontiers without the responsibility of shepherding paying passengers and had been especially looking forward to this assignment. I was continually amazed that my livelihood dispatched me to exotic ports of call and, better still, allowed me unfettered access to the great and gregarious scientific minds at the AMNH. Those self-same individuals were a highlight of our Discovery Tours, which attracted adventurous and sophisticated travelers wishing to visit the great natural wonders of the world in the company of experts in the biological sciences, geology, and archaeology.

Now here I was, en route to Madagascar. The name alone summoned a sense of magic. Sadly, with my intestinal fortitude under attack, the journey—from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi to Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital—had sapped my enthusiasm. Still, I was determined to see all I could. It took another flight and hours in a Land Rover to reach the private Berenty Reserve, a former French-Colonial sisal plantation in the far south of the country where, at last, I gratefully fell into a deep sleep. There, I woke to encounter my first lemur—that orange-eyed beauty on dawn patrol. We were, each of us, a front-line scout of sorts.

While touring the property, it was clear that the resident troop of ring-tailed lemurs ruled the roost. They paraded about the reserve with all the pride of ownership, luxuriant tails held high and swaying in the breeze like bewitched black-and-white-striped cobras. Much larger sifaka lemurs—their black faces enveloped by a coat of white fur—leapt and danced along the periphery of the forests, pausing occasionally to stare at us in passing. I was thoroughly enchanted.

Before that whirlwind trip, I’d known nothing of lemurs and little about Madagascar. That quick trip had not informed me of elements political or ecological. The damaged earth had been my only clue. I had yet to learn the extent of the troubles there that would only grow more extreme.

While Madagascar struggled, I returned to my frenetic-as-ever life back in New York City. The lemurs I’d encountered were never far from my thoughts. Still, time passed. Two years, in fact after that indelible experience.

I’d booked a lunch date with Dr. Ian Tattersall, Curator and Chairman of the Museum’s Department of Anthropology. It was pure coincidence that he also happens to be one of the world’s foremost experts on both lemurs and human evolution. Ian was then (and remains) my good friend, and we were intent on catching up and trading Museum gossip.

Fluent in anthropology, geology, and vertebrate paleontology, Ian is a fabulous raconteur. Add to that his wry wit, and seemingly limitless knowledge of (and appreciation for) fine wines and international beers, and you can imagine how agreeable it is to be in his company.

Both of us came of age in the 1960s—I in the States, Ian in Britain, Kenya, and Uganda. We don’t always see eye to eye (literally—he’s an elegant six-foot-something to my five-foot-four frame). But each of us brings out something in the other, whether trading funny anecdotes, discussing off-beat books and music, musing philosophical, or discussing personal issues; we have always found a way to sustain our friendship.

Over lunch, Ian and I discussed the plight of Madagascar’s lemurs…something I hadn’t grasped at all during my brief Malagasy sojourn. Ian had worked there years earlier and, in that time, discovered a lemur species that would eventually bear his name, Propithecus tattersalli. He summarized for me the country’s many problems—political upheaval as rivals jockeyed for power, extreme poverty, and rampant deforestation of an island once boasting dense woodlands across much of its length and breadth. Now, he despaired for all lemurs. Pausing, Ian evoked an uncharacteristic emotion: defeat. He admitted that he could not bear the idea of lemurs not making it into the twenty-first century.

As he spoke, a brainstorm hit me, and I saw a possible way forward. He and I would start a foundation using a small inheritance I’d recently received. We would do something about the encroaching lemur disaster!

Ian nodded agreeably but didn’t really consider what that pie-in-the-sky idea might become, conceived on a Manhattan street corner one odd and momentous afternoon in late September 1995.

Such revelations don’t emerge completely out of the blue. My dreams of Africa and protecting strange critters go all the way back to my childhood in 1950s’ Miami. Saturday morning TV shows like Ramar of the Jungle and African Patrol filled my head with thoughts of exploration and thrilling wildlife encounters.

And when I was in sixth grade, my mother’s cousin, Father Joe Loftus, arrived from South Africa (what is now Kwa Zulu-Natal). He had been visiting another of our cousins, Father Mel Loftus, a missionary priest living there. Priests and nuns were ever-present in our sprawling Irish-Catholic family. Father Mel had sent my sister and me delicate elephant-hair bracelets with small charms carved from real ivory. I cherished and wore mine for years, unaware of the price elephants paid in the production of such trinkets. Over dinner, Father Joe entertained us with tales that transfixed me—of the African landscape and life at the Catholic mission.

Longing for sainthood and adventure, I made up my mind then and there to become a missionary-nun-slash-veterinarian in faraway Congo. While things didn’t happen quite as my youthful fantasy envisioned them, the seeds of inspiration had been planted in my eleven-year-old brain.

Going forth, I was also fortified with tenacity and imagination—my birthright from a scrappy, self-possessed mother and wonderful dreamer of a father.

Dorothy Rita Mary Gilmartin Bodry was not particularly interested in what other people thought of her. Her best friends in the late ‘50s were a gay couple, a prostitute, and a Jewish woman who owned the coffee shop where Mom worked the dawn shift. (Many Catholics held a bias against Jews, seeming to forget that Jesus was himself Jewish. Mom taught my siblings and me to see beyond such faulty logic and hypocrisy.)

Self-effacing to a fault, my mom had a quiet courage that inspired me. When I was about ten, she and I went to the Miami bus station to fetch my grandmother, who was arriving from Chicago. A large black man had vomited there in the waiting room. While everyone else recoiled in disgust, my diminutive mom followed him as he staggered outside, humiliated and unwell. Her offer of smelling salts from her purse was rebuffed (I suspect he was embarrassed by the attention), but I recognized then that she would never have thought to do otherwise. That experience left me both flustered and in awe.

Our lower-middle-class family of five lived for several years in a tiny trailer near the Miami River. A slightly larger trailer followed before we moved up in the world to a “cracker house”—a small wooden structure with five rooms and a screened-in porch. My brother, sister, and I shared a bedroom and were so happy to live in a real house. Dad was ostensibly a car salesman, but never managed to sell a single vehicle. So, for a time, our brood lived entirely on what mom earned waitressing.

Our fortunes changed when my mother’s gay friends, Carl and Eddie, convinced her that she could make money by breeding miniature poodles. She saved up and bought our beloved pet, Bobbin. Carl found an appropriate stud and soon we had our first litter of puppies. The income from those pups emboldened Mom to search for a better home. She put $10 down on a brand-new house in Miami Springs (the full price tag was $10,000) and told my dad, “Okay, Frankie. You’re going to get a real job now.” She even manifested that job for him, at nearby Pan American Airlines.

Her matter-of-fact manner extended to each of us...