Croc Farm - Coquerel's sifaka

A coquerel\'s sifaka in the trees at Croc Farm, Antananarivo. The sifakas here are free-ranging at the park and visitors can get quite close to them.

Croc Farm is a privately-owned zoo and crocodile farm just outside of Antananarivo. At Croc Farm you can see mostly native species from Madagascar.

March 2010

I love watching these guys at the LA Zoo. They have their enclosure set up with several trees that they frequently use to jump across their enclosure.

Did you get to see any wild sifakas in Madagascar? What were some of the wild animal highlights of your trip there?

When I visited Madagascar I went to do volunteer conservation/biodiversity work in the littoral rainforests of south-eastern Madagascar. These are types of coastal rainforests that are almost nothing left of and yet they are the only of their kind of forest on the planet.

This means I actually didn't do any of the normal tourist places or wildlife highlights that the island is so famous for. However, I got to journey of the beaten track and I am very pleased with that.

Being a bit of a lemur freak my main objective with this trip was seeing lemurs, and that I did. I saw five different species of truly wild lemurs in populations that had never been studied before and were in no way habituated to human presence (those marked with a * cannot be seen outside Madagaskar and those marked ** can only be seen in the wild):

Red-collared brown lemur (Eulemur collaris)
Southern woolly lemur (Avahi meridionalis)**
Gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus)
Rufous mouse lemur (Microcebus rufus)
Fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius)

I also saw three species of more-or-less habituated, semi-wild lemurs in the Nahampoana Reserve close to Tolagnaro (as well as more red-collared browns):

Ring-tailed lemur (Eulemur collaris)
Verreaux's sifaka (propithecus verreauxi)**
Southern bamboo lemur (Hapalemur meridionalis)**

And I also saw a staggering 18 species of lemur at the Tsimbazaza Zoo and Croc Farm in total, including most of the "regular zoo-species" as well as more rare ones, including the coquerel's sifakas, gray bamboo lemurs, greater dwarf lemurs*, Jolly's mouse lemurs*, Mittermeier's mouse lemurs* and rufus brown lemurs*.

It was also in Tsimbazaza that I had my (very) close encounter with an aye-aye inside it's holding cage. A very special experience.

Most of the wild animals I saw were fairly small and the studies we did focused mainly on the before-mentioned lemurs as well as the reptiles and amphibians in the area (of which we quite possibly discovered a few new species). However, I did see tenrecs, shrews, tenrec shrews, owls, buzzards, vasa parrots, sunbirds and loads of lizards (including chameleons) and frogs.

I will be glad to answer any questions you may have about the fascinating island as best I can

Thanks for the great trip report Toddy. It sounds like you had a great experience and saw some really interesting wildlife. For a lemur freak it must have been a wonderful trip.