Two Albifrons and a Funeral
By Matt McGee, PhD Student, University of California, Berkeley
Previously on “Matt’s Field Season”: I arrived in Madagascar at the end of June, fresh-faced and dewy-eyed, ready to start the first field season of my dissertation research. Things went awry, and with my project on life support, I was struck by an idea that could not only salvage the project, but also expand it in exciting ways, and I left y’all right as I began to implement that idea.
The problem, I think, with writing your story before it’s done is that you may misjudge the part of the story you’re experiencing. The first six weeks of my field season had such a compelling narrative arc that it was easy to believe I reached the denouement on a cool evening in early August. The vagaries of fieldwork had turned against me, but I turned right back against them. Setbacks became opportunities. The remainder of my field season flowed out before me, paragraphs outlined in starlight, a jubilant epilogue to the story I had already written.
But this isn’t that story. This isn’t “Frolics with Fossa: A Matt McGee Adventure.” There’s no falling asleep in a soft heap of lemurs; there’s no meet-cute with my soulmate at the whims of a mischievous malachite kingfisher. This is the beginning of a demanding PhD dissertation project that will ideally launch a long, globetrotting career in ecology research, and both will be filled with problems that aren’t magically resolved by one spark of inspiration. And I knew that, but I didn’t quite understand it yet. Not on the morning of September 1, when I piled into a truck with my team to start the first session of data collection. But when I limped into Camp Indri eight hours later, barely able to walk, it was starting to sink in.
I thought my field season was done just as it was really beginning. Pain had slowly blossomed in my knee as I churned through the thick mud on the road. The final 5 minutes into Camp Indri took me an agonizing 15. I crawled into my tent, sad and scared, afraid I’d torn a ligament, afraid I would need surgery, afraid my dream would shrivel on the vine inches in front of my face. I didn’t even have internet to check my symptoms. Reality washed over me like a bucket of cold river water. But as the shock wore off, so did the fear. I would have to be smart instead of reckless, but I had ibuprofen, instant ice packs, a knee brace, and an entire team with uninjured knees. And by the time dinner was ready, I had a plan too.
Two days later, I felt recovered enough to hike 2.5 hours to Site 2, and I even hobbled out for the first hour of surveys the following morning. My knee still hurt, but it appeared I had avoided major injury. I badly wanted to go on the surveys—it still hurt my heart a little to look at the data my team collected and see the birds and lemurs that I had missed—but I was the leader and thus I had to remain disgustingly intelligent about safety. I also wasn’t particularly interested in long-term knee damage. After a gloomy, rain-soaked week in my tent, it was time for me to go back to Andapa and let my team push on without me until the next session.
Things continued to go wrong. I made mistakes. My team made mistakes. Little errors reverberated for weeks and months, cascading through my data. I wasn’t even sure if my methods were working properly. Things went right, too, of course, and we learned from the mistakes, adjusted where we could, improved as we got more experience. We learned more bird calls and figured out which camps got enough sun to dry laundry.
Session 2 got off to a sunny start at Site 1, and my knee felt healthy enough for me to go on about half of the surveys. I saw Seal’s sportive lemur (Leplimeur seali), Goodman’s mouse lemur (Microcebus lehilahytsara), and greater dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus major) on my first night hike of the season. I fell down a hill after a collared nightjar and watched a snake hunt a lizard while I rested on a log in the sun. And I finally got a chance to really see how my project worked in the reality of ASSR. And what I saw filled me with doubt.
Those doubts hung over me as we moved to Site 4, the new site in the southwest that I was very excited to see. Site 4 was deeper in the forest, a wonderful site with lots of wildlife in camp, but the hike was tough and my knee was already wearing down. I went on fewer surveys at Site 4, instead finding spots around camp to make observations and learn more birds—and to let my mind race, thinking about my methods, what worked, what didn’t, what might work in the future. Everything I was doing was so new to me and every element of the project felt daunting, teetering on the edge of impossibility. I couldn’t help but wonder if my field season would actually end up a failure. Sometimes it seemed like I was missing something foundational, and that scared me more than my knee injury had. Maybe losing a dream wasn’t the worst outcome. Maybe there was a deeper heartbreak.
October 1 dawned clear and crisp, a wonderfully sunny day after 24 straight hours of rain. My knee ached from the moment I woke up, so I hung back in camp when my team left to conduct surveys. I spent the morning learning the calls of a new bird—a Madagascar brush warbler, a species we had continually missed on our surveys to that point—before my team arrived back to camp for lunch. They left again a few hours later to prepare for a night survey, and with the cook asleep in his tent, something unusual happened…I was in camp completely alone. I sat at our table made of sticks, trying to focus on the data sheets I was trying to make, but I was feeling energized after solving one of the seemingly countless mysteries the forest had presented to me. So when I heard the grunting of what I thought were white-fronted brown lemurs (Eulemur albifrons) up the hill from camp, I glanced over at my walking stick glittering in the warm golden sunlight, and there was only one decision I could possibly make. I wasn’t sure if those were actually the calls of albifrons, but I was going to find out.
I crossed the stream that bordered camp and slowly made my way up the trail. As I reached the ridge, the two grunting lemurs spotted me and jumped away through the trees. I stopped. They stopped too. I walked a little closer. They jumped away again. We continued this pattern another 100 meters along the trail until we finally found a good vantage point to look at each other from what they considered an acceptable distance. I stood there for maybe 10 minutes, watching the two albifrons swishing their tails, staring back at me from beneath the thick white fur on their heads. And then I looked around to see where they had brought me.
There were gaps in the trees where I stood on the ridge, and I could see down into the valleys on both sides. I stood below the canopy and above the treetops, like I was seeing every perspective of the forest at once. When I looked to the west, I saw brightly colored sunbirds foraging on a flowering tree. It was all blanketed in fading sunshine. And for the first time in months, I started to cry. The project I had imagined died in that moment, late in the afternoon on October 1, only witnessed by me and two Eulemur albifrons—three strangers at a funeral. Sometimes I felt stupendously, overwhelmingly alone during my field season. Sometimes I felt the entire weight of Anjanaharibe-Sud pressing into me. But as I listened to the lemurs make their inquisitive grunts, my heart warmed and my sobs turned to laughs.
They didn’t know why I was crying. They didn’t know that I had, in that moment, realized my project wasn’t actually a failure. I needed to break it apart, sort through the rubble, test and refine and develop every component. But I had the imagination to do it, and I had the belief that I could do it, and I had time. I finally understood where I was in the story. I didn’t know what was coming, that I still had the best moment and the worst moment of the field season ahead of me, but as I look back on that day from the comfort of my lab in Berkeley, that moment with the albifrons still feels like the most pivotal.
The two lemurs didn’t know that. But they were there, and that was all that mattered.
To be continued….
