Heat And Dust

Madagascar is an island of extremes. While the east is cloaked in soaking rainforest, the west and south is almost a desert. This is a scorching landscape where it might not rain for nine months of the year, and some years not at all. To live here, you have to be a specialist. The animals and plants of the dry southern lands are stranger and more mysterious than on any other part of the island, and their strategies for surviving the dryness are extraordinary. Verreaux's sifaka, a kind of lemur, lives in Madagascar's 'spiny forest' where trees have savage spikes, and some drip toxic chemicals. Amongst the bulbous trees of the baobab forests, huge-eyed mouse lemurs, the world's smallest primates, emerge at night to feed on the sugary droppings of bizarre fluffy bugs.