The Private Islands off Madagascar Creating a Future for Endangered Lemurs

At first, I can see nothing. Then a grey tail comes into view, dangling a couple of metres above the ground.

My first crowned lemur. She stands upright on a branch, munching shiny green leaves, sunlight catching the brown running through her grey fur. A fleeting glance in my direction reveals amber eyes and a distinctive tiara of orange — the marking that gives her species its name. Then, she springs from the trunk like a sprinter from the starting blocks and vanishes, leaving barely a rustle in her wake. “The rest of the troop are near,” whispers ranger coordinator Zuo Razafijoana, his blue shirt bright against the forest’s muted greens and browns.

We crouch, scanning the low branches. Fallen foliage crunches beneath my boots and a breeze from the Indian Ocean rattles the canopy. Metres away, a baby lemur pulls a springy branch towards her mouth, attempting to bite its spinach-like leaves. Her crown is only just coming in. “This one was born in December,” says Zuo. “It’s a female — see the grey and brown colouring.”

Higher up, her mother keeps an eye on her while choosing the next leaf to eat. Eventually, the pair bound upwards and a sharp, short call comes from the trees. “She’s communicating with their troop, asking: ‘where are you guys?’,” says Zuo. The Malagasy ranger team records the morning’s observations — numbers, locations and behaviours. For me, it’s an encounter to treasure. For them, it’s another entry in the long record of how this transplanted population is faring.

I arrived on the tiny island of Nosy Ankao two days ago, at the start of a five-day reef-to-forest safari on the islands off Madagascar’s northern coast. The trip pairs two properties from Time + Tide, a hotel group that offers a particularly lavish version of castaway life. Here at Miavana, there are private pools, dedicated butlers and helicopters to carry guests into the country’s remote interior. But the lemurs have come for something more fundamental: safety. Brought from imperilled forests on the main island, they form a breeding colony intended to help safeguard one of the world’s most threatened groups of mammals. Among all the remarkable things money can arrange at Miavana, this may be the most consequential — an island retreat that doubles as a lifeboat.

The pleasures are easy to appreciate. Yesterday, after a morning of snorkelling, a motorboat accompanied by a pod of dolphins took me to nearby Nosy Manampaho, where sooty terns gather in their thousands. On a deserted beach, beneath an umbrella, I ate a picnic of charcuterie served with silverware while a murmuration of black-and-white wings wheeled across the sky.

Now, emerging from the forest, I find my butler, Nadia, waiting to take me back to my villa in a golf buggy. Walls of coastal flora flank the path before opening onto an uninterrupted stretch of white beach dusted with flecks of tangerine coral. I slip into my pool and cool off with a chilled glass of freshly pressed soursop juice, its creamy sweetness brightened by a sharpness like citrus.

That evening, over plates of local rock lobster and spicy crab, I join island sustainability manager Dr Mouneshwar Soondur to learn how the lemurs found their way here. “In 2016, there was a significant poaching event in the Bekaraoka Forest on the main island of Madagascar,” he explains. At the time, Nosy Ankao was undergoing a transformation of its own. Previously the site of a seaweed-farming operation, the island was being developed by Time + Tide founder Thierry Dalais. Plans combined the creation of an exceptionally luxurious resort with the restoration of the island’s vegetation. The result was the opening of Miavana in 2017; that same year, the first four lemurs arrived.

Two further translocations followed, he tells me, and, to date, 17 lemurs have been born here, four in the past year. The youngster I watched tugging at branches this morning is part of that latest generation. “The colony is like an insurance policy,” he says. “We let them reproduce here in case the species disappears on the main island. Then, some can return there once we know it’s safe.”

That last condition matters. An island refuge can provide room for a population to grow, but returning animals to the mainland depends on addressing the threats that drove them out. “We’re supporting reforestation and conservation initiatives in the village close to Bekaraoka Forest as well,” Mouneshwar adds.

There’s an older force at work here, too — one I encounter the next day in Ampasimangidy, the island’s village, where guest experience manager Johnson Ratsimanadino introduces me to local president Jean Claude Jaodimasy. His sister-in-law, Mama Silance, runs a bar from the verandah of a palm-thatched house, and he waves us into it, placing bottles of local beer and soda on the table. Jean Claude’s ancestors came from the mainland more than a century ago to found this village. The lemurs are far newer arrivals, but no less familiar.

For Jean Claude, protecting lemurs is a duty passed down through the generations. “For Sakalava-Anjoaty people [the ethnic group to which he and the village’s residents belong], harming lemurs is forbidden,” he explains. The taboo is known as fady and, while customs vary between communities, there’s a respect for lemurs that long predates the resort.

As Johnson and I leave on a quad bike in the fading light, he tells me this same taboo protects lemurs on Madagascar’s western coast and archipelagos, home to another branch of the Sakalava. That’s where I’m heading tomorrow: Nosy Komba — ‘lemur island’ — and Time + Tide’s Tsara Komba lodge.

Across the Water

The following afternoon, I board one of Miavana’s turquoise helicopters. Captain Kyle Roeloffze points out interesting features in the landscape as northern Madagascar unfolds below. Baobabs rise high enough for me to make out their white blossoms. Forest gives way to the tsingy of Ankarana, sharp limestone pinnacles that create a jagged, stone skyline.

From this privileged vantage point, the pressures on the landscape are visible, too. Scorched red earth interrupts the green; cattle pastures and rice paddies spread across cleared ground. Mouneshwar’s words about returning lemurs to the mainland take on a different weight. From the air, it’s easy to see why safety can’t simply be assumed beyond the island’s shores.

The western archipelago is quite the contrast; the islands are lush green dots rising from the aquamarine Mozambique Channel. We descend onto Nosy Be — ‘big island’ — where a Time + Tide motorboat is waiting to take me to Nosy Komba. At the resort, I count eight thatched-roof villas, each clinging to a forested hillside that leads down towards the ocean.

Before the sun begins to set, I join guide Giovanni Takali as he walks along the beach to the neighbouring village of Antrema. Sakalava music from a radio blasts across the palm roofs, chickens roam between houses and shoppers browse baskets of purple aubergines and garlic at a stall. The lemurs, Giovanni tells me, are frequent visitors.

Not far from the bustle, two are curled together in the upper reaches of a mango tree. These are black lemurs, although the name only tells half the story. “The male is completely black, but the female is actually brown,” says Giovanni. As if to demonstrate, the fox-like female wakes, revealing fluffy white tufts on either side of her face. “The problem is that people come from elsewhere to catch lemurs,” Giovanni tells me as we head back.

Later, I retreat to a bed the size of a small room, its carved four posters hung with a theatrical fall of white netting. Lantern light moves across polished wood and the doors have been folded back to let the air circulate. Waves lap on the shore below and the forest hums with life.

It’s a sound that follows me into the next morning, when general manager Nava Rabe finds me at breakfast with plans for another outing. “You’ll go to Lokobe National Park today,” she says with some ceremony. The last stretch of primary forest in the region, Lokobe on Nosy Be is a vital sanctuary for black and sportive lemurs, as well as mouse lemurs, which are among the smallest primates on Earth.

Over breakfast, Nava explains that a guide from Ampasipohy, the village bordering the forest, will meet me there. “The locals have a connection to the land and its wildlife that you can’t learn from a book. In a way, they’re its guardians,” she says. “We aren’t simply bringing guests to see Madagascar’s wildlife. We’re helping to create opportunities for the people who have lived alongside it all their lives.”

When our motorboat pulls up to Ampasipohy, my guide Anwar Ali is waiting in ankle-deep water to help me ashore. He leads Giovanni and me through the village, where women line the pathway with embroidered tablecloths, white fabric billowing around colourful depictions of turtles, plants and lemurs. Giovanni points out an intricately stitched blue lemur: a little preview of the wildlife we’ve come to find.

Beyond the village, the air cools as we step beneath a colossal canopy of ancient vines and branches home to a microcosm of endemic life. Anwar walks barefoot over ferns and twigs, picking out creatures I’d never spot in a million years. Within minutes, he’s spied a spectral pygmy chameleon, no larger than my little toe, and a Madagascar scops owl sleeping upright on a branch.

I ask how he knows where to look. “This is my back garden,” he says, grinning. Watching him, I remember something Johnson told me about the difficulty of protecting forests where people depend on what they can grow and gather. “It’s no good telling people they can’t cut the forest,” he’d said. “Teach them and give them alternative jobs — then they’ll stop.”

There are limits to what even Miavana’s considerable resources can achieve on one small island. The colony offers a refuge; the longer-term ambition of returning lemurs to their former forests depends on what happens beyond it. Here, with Anwar, that wider task comes into focus: making the skills needed to find an owl, recognise a chameleon or follow a lemur valuable enough to sustain a living.

And for a visitor, those skills are what turn a wall of green into somewhere astonishingly alive. Anwar leads us to a tree hollow and I gaze up. A fuzzy grey face looks back, with rounded ears and saucer-like brown eyes: a lone sportive lemur. After the helicopters, the silverware and the private pool, I’m back to standing beneath a tree, looking up. This time, I know a little more about what it takes to keep a lemur there.