Perhaps the strangest-looking of all primates is the extraordinary Aye-aye. They spend the day sleeping in one of several large untidy nests made of masses of twigs high up in trees. We walked a long way through dry forest just before dusk, past people digging deep pits looking for gold dust in the soil. Trackers had identified which tree the Aye-ayes were in, so we took up our positions before it got dark and had to keep very still and quiet as they are so shy and easily scared off. Eventually they emerged – and didn’t seem camera-shy after all although it was difficult to photograph them in the dark about 10m high.
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- Aye-aye
They were a lot bigger than I had imagined from TV programmes – up to a metre long including their very long, thick bushy tails, and weighing nearly 2kg. They have very long fingers, the middle one of which is extended so that they can poke it deep into holes in trees to extract grubs.
I’ll leave you to decide whether you think they are ugly, quaint, appealing – or what?!
But now for some rather more endearing lemurs – some Brown Lemurs.
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- Common Brown Lemur
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- Common Brown Lemurs are normally feeding up in the trees, but this one seemd to have no fear of us and came down to our level to investigate!
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- Crowned Lemur (male)
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- Male and young (right) Crowned Lemurs
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- Crowned Lemur with her baby
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- Male Crowned Lemur
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- Only the male has white fur around its face
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- White-fronted Brown Lemurs
CROSSING CULTURES, FINDING FREEDOM 
Thank you for the photos. The Lemurs this week have been very enlightening! Chester Zoo has a dedicated enclosure where the visitors can walk among Lemurs – quite an experience.
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Thank you for appreciating the the photos. There’s a small island in Madagascar which has some rehabilitated lemurs on it. They are very tame and even sit on your shoulder. Not the genuine experience, but great to get so close to them, although some species are not very fearful of people even in the wild.
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