Am drenched in mud and rain and sweat. Today was a challenge, inspiring polar-opposite ranges of emotion. (Black and white ruffed lemurs are making their “Daffy Duck�-sounding guttural calls in the misty forest that surrounds me. I have yet to see one in the canopy. It’s amazing to listen to them, at any rate.) Today we were lucky enough to see a pair of birds in the parrot family that I was told are endemic to these forests of Madagascar. For a tropical rainforest, I’m amazed by how little bird species diversity you see—not at all what I expected. We also saw a spectacular tree frog with enormous webbed hands and feet for gripping tree trunks – a beautiful red body with spiked leg joints, about the size of the palm of my hand, with wonderfully expressive eyes. Looked very much like Tim Laman’s cover shot of a glider frog in Borneo from N.G. Very beautiful.

Less beautiful are my feet right now. They have been stuffed into “waterproof� hiking boots for seven days running now, completely soaked for a stretch of 11 hours straight every day. The toes on my left foot are burning and stinging from a colony of athlete’s foot fungus that has taken over there. Forget about blister and sore spots, the wetness is the worst. The athlete’s foot spreads a little more each day, and the antifungal cream I apply in our wet tent each night has no chance to take effect.

Also, today was a particularly strenuous one. Our transect—hah! just killed a mosquito!—ran directly over the rock face of a cliff. Without repelling gear there was no way for us to follow it down the side of the mountain, so we had to search an alternate route around the cliff face and return to meet the transect at its base. This involved half a day of hiking to relocate the transect, and then 2 hours’ hike back to camp. Lost a lot of time that should have been dedicated to doing study plots. It poured most of the while also. It’s so hard to stay positive under conditions like these, but I’m trying.

The rainforest has a completely different character when it’s raining and when it’s dry. When the weather is fine, it is fascinating to be here. Heard the haunting whale-song-like call of babakoty (Indri indri) off in the distance today. I get chills every time I hear them. Indri are one thing Makira has that Masoala does not. Glad I got to see them so close at Andasibe so that I now recognize their vocalizations. Also passed through a good deal of degraded forest today as we struggled to find a traversable route back to the transect. This was not human-induced, but a remnant of the powerful cyclone that hit this region in April of 2003 and devastated entire areas with tree falls and flooding. Felicien, one of the mission tree specialists, told me that 7 people died from his village when the cyclone hit and most lost that season’s rice crop, creating a mini-depression in Marovovonana and elsewhere.