Natural World (1983) s31e10 Episode Script
Madagascar, Lemurs and Spies
The rain-drenched jungles of Madagascar are home to one of the rarest animals in the world - the mysterious silky sifaka.
This is William.
At just four months old, he's the latest addition to a troop of these endangered lemurs.
He is the hope for a species in trouble.
And his future is in the hands of two men from two very different worlds.
A dedicated scientist has joined forces with an undercover detective.
Their aim - to try and save the silky sifakas.
Madagascar is the most exclusive of islands.
Over 80% of its wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth.
And it's home to our most primitive primate cousins - the lemurs.
Over 80 species have adapted to the island's diverse landscapes.
But the greatest variety live in the tropical rainforests that cling to the mountains.
Here, there are still lost worlds yet to be explored.
They are the last refuge of one of the rarest of all lemurs .
.
the silky sifaka.
It's these elusive primates that have drawn biologist Erik Patel to the mountains of Marojejy.
His day begins at dawn.
The early mornings can be hard.
At 4:30, you're waking up in the dark.
Nothing's dry, you're putting on the same wet clothes, and I find that if I can get to my cup of coffee in the morning, I'm OK.
Erik came from Chicago ten years ago, to begin the world's first study of silkies.
It's a far cry from home.
Every morning, leeches on the eyeballs, scorpions in the toilet and poisonous centipedes dangling from the bungalows.
Those would be the top three joys of working here.
Many would have given up, but he's braved the isolation, built a camp and a dedicated team.
Erik's determined, but his challenge is immense.
With as few as 300 silkies left, Erik's research is vital to save them from extinction.
But even finding them in this steep mountainous rainforest is tough.
He works with a local team of specialist trackers.
And they don't use walkie-talkies to keep in touch.
HE MAKES ANIMAL CRY CRY ECHOES The reply comes from a guide who's been out since 2am.
It draws them closer.
When Erik first arrived, the silkies lived up to their local name as ghosts of the forest .
.
and always fled.
But a decade later, one troop easily accepts his presence.
Silky sifakas are just beautiful, shy, social, and such vulnerable creatures.
You know, they hardly fight at all.
They spend huge amounts of time just grooming and playing.
They're each very different from one another.
To gaze into their eyes for the first time up close is really, really hard to forget.
Before Erik arrived, nothing was known about silkies.
He's trying to discover the basics of their behaviour and how they use the forest.
Only then will he know what they need to survive And over the years, he's got to know these seven silkies like his own family.
We've got the adult male, his name is Lahi Vo.
It means New Male in Malagasy.
He's only been around for about two years.
He displaced our old resident male, who had been here for my first seven years.
But Erik has found the real leader is a female, now about 20 years old, called AF.
AF stands for Antenna Female.
She used to have a radio collar and we needed that in the first year to help us find the group.
But after a year,we removed the collar, but she keeps her name, AF, Antenna Female.
Also in the group is a second mature female and several boisterous juveniles.
They spend much of the day wrestling when they're not feeding or falling off of trees, as juveniles often do.
But Erik's favourite is the youngest - AF's baby, called William.
He was conceived on Christmas day.
They're so tiny when they're born.
They almost look like little rodents, like the cutest little rats you've ever seen.
They have this long skinny tail and very little fur.
And they're just stuck to their mother's abdomen.
They're, like, one twentieth the size of their mothers.
They don't even leave their mother for weeks.
Erik's troop lives high on the mountains of Marojejy - a National Park where rainforest wraps around ancient peaks and hidden valleys.
And the silkies share their home with many other Madagascan oddities.
Bamboo lemurs eat only cyanide-rich bamboo .
.
at doses that are lethal to humans.
No-one understands how they do it.
Pygmy chameleons hunt on the forest floor.
And predatory Helmet Vangas nest in the crown of a palm.
But silkies are the rarest of them all.
Silky sifakas are an extremely critically endangered animal, and there are only possibly as few as a few hundred remaining in just a small corner of north-eastern Madagascar.
And their diet is so complex - it's over 150 species, many of which are rare rainforest plants and trees - that they've never survived in captivity, they don't survive in zoos.
Their diet is just too difficult to replicate.
But it's not just their dependence on a healthy intact forest that makes them vulnerable.
Silkies give birth to only one baby every two years.
And the females are fertile for just one day each year.
So, every newborn is like gold dust, making William Erik's only chance to discover the details of how a youngster grows up.
It's such a pleasure to watch him exploring around .
.
but then always returning to its mother.
They must have some well-developed muscles at a young age to be able to hang on to those mothers as they're flying through the trees.
Over the next year, young William has a lot of challenges to face.
All our eyes and hopes are on this one infant.
As well as following their lives, Erik needs to find out if they're healthy.
He can't catch them, but he has a plan.
I'm hoping the silkies will defecate soon, because we need quite a lot of faecal samples to investigate the type of parasites that the silkies may be harbouring.
And he's particularly interested in getting a sample from William.
It can take quite a long time.
They do poop about ten times a day, but it's never enough, you know.
It's a bit like waiting for the bride tossing the bouquet of flowers, you know, we're all sitting here waiting for these precious poops to fall and then tracking them, trying to identify whose faecal it is, where it is on the ground and getting to it.
I have been pissed on in the face before and it burns, actually.
When silky sifaka urine hits your mouth, as it has mine, it stings.
Yeah, it's not a pleasant experience.
But it's worth it.
Poop is precious.
It's like black gold for us.
It's quite small.
Yeah, it's too small.
Oui, oui.
It's William's, maybe.
Yeah, yeah, it is William's faecal.
Nice small baby poop.
Good job finding it.
It's not easy to find any poop.
But to find those small baby poops - that's doubly hard.
After analysis, Erik will know if William is struggling with parasites, which may affect his chances of survival.
To save a species, you have to know how many there are, so Erik is constantly exploring Marojejy and beyond to places unknown to science, looking for new troops and putting them on the map.
We go by here.
OK.
From Andakata Yeah.
.
.
to Ambalazedna Knowing where the silkies live means Erik can pinpoint his efforts to protect them.
We're travelling huge distances with dozens of porters.
Camping in places we've never been, relying on local guides we've never met and exploring in forests that we're not familiar with.
But it's exciting, and it's fun to delve into these lost worlds, but it can be dangerous as well.
Sadly, his surveys often reveal no silkies, but instead, alarming signs of the threats to this fragile sanctuary.
There's a house here, this is a temporary logging house.
These men came here and they built this house so they could set up camp while they cut down a large number of rosewood trees.
Rosewood trees can be between 200 and 400 years old and they are some of the tallest, oldest and most valuable trees in the forest.
These things are sometimes booby-trapped.
Look at that.
Such a thing of beauty that can be contributing to the extinction of the silky sifaka.
It's ridiculous.
Fresh rice.
This is not old.
This is very, very recent.
I'd like to destroy this thing.
It might be really cathartic.
But I have a feeling .
.
it's better if we stay undercover for a while.
But if it's still here in a week, we should just come and tear it down.
It's not like it would take them more than five minutes to build a new one anyway.
Illegal logging reached crisis levels in Madagascar after a political coup in March, 2009.
There was a complete breakdown in law and order in the capital, and no longer protection for the remote National Parks.
Loggers and armed men swarmed into the parks, working in organised gangs for the timber mafia.
It was a gold rush to take out ebony and rosewood.
Each tree worth up to 4,000 dollars to the timber barons.
It takes at least five men to haul this incredibly dense timber out of the forest, gauging a trail of destruction.
Makeshift villages sprang up deep in the rainforest, hunting every animal for food, including lemurs.
For rosewood and ebony loggers, the value of these trees is only realised when they are dragged out of the forest.
And when you see the forest through the eyes of money and greed, everything changes.
The threat to the lemurs wasn't just from hunting.
The human disturbance could disrupt the rare mating chances for these reclusive animals.
The only way to save silky sifakas is to save the few remaining patches of rainforest where they are found.
It can be that simple, yet it can be so difficult to do just that.
With illegal logging on his doorstep, Erik was forced to make a choice - whether to remain a silent witness or fight back.
I didn't set out to study illegal logging.
The issue came to me.
I feel a sense of obligation.
I feel like I owe it to the animals to just speak the truth.
To just be honest about what's happening here.
We all have to live with ourselves and I don't think I could do it any other way.
Every few weeks, Erik must come to the nearest town for fresh supplies.
But more importantly, he can use the only internet cafe in town to share his information about illicit logging with the wider world.
And he's not alone - there's a whole network of people trying to expose the illegal timber trade.
We know exactly who's making the money, who's cutting the wood, who's selling it, who's buying it.
We know what's happening at the ports, in the ministries, on the streets, and even in the forests.
There are eyes everywhere.
We know exactly what's happening, even if we can't stop all of it.
And all of us take tremendous risks each and every day.
During the height of the troubles, Erik realised that the network needed someone who could take on the logging mafia and tackle international demand for this precious wood.
That crucial breakthrough came to him in a magazine article.
It was an inspiring biography about someone who had really worked undercover a lot, trying to expose and stop illegal logging around the world.
As soon as I read that article, I knew we needed this guy here, and he might be one of the only people who could get us out of this mess.
That man was Sascha von Bismarck.
He runs the Environmental Investigation Agency in Washington DC.
In Sascha, Erik found a powerful and determined ally.
Erik's battle is the most important - it's in the forest, but from there, you can't fight these forces in the international market place that are after the wood, that are making his life so difficult there, and I think that's where we come in, that we track the wood, find out where it's going.
Sascha could help Erik to attack the timber barons where it hurt - by stopping their lucrative export trade.
And he had a revolutionary new law on his side - the 2008 amendment to the Lacey Act.
This law means that for the first time, American companies can face heavy fines and their bosses could be imprisoned if they have imported illegal timber.
With Erik's evidence, Sascha knew he could launch an investigation into Madagascan wood coming to the States, and he was prepared to take the risks others could not.
Often, we found that the way we can help is that we can provide cover for those folks that are working really hard, sometimes risking their lives in investigating that kind of crime.
They can often use a group like us to get the information out and to do additional research to connect the dots, get the real names of who's really behind it.
And hopefully do something with that information that makes a difference.
To build a watertight case, Sascha had to turn detective and pin down specific, detailed evidence.
The investigation began in 2009 and meant he had to leave Washington and go undercover in Madagascar posing as a wood trader.
The preparation had to be perfect.
We have to set up an undercover company, a website, business cards and good back stories because you never know when it's going to get tough.
It can be very easy, very easy, and then suddenly very difficult and very dangerous, obviously.
So you need to be ready with a lot of details.
Sascha's mission to save the forests had truly begun.
In Madagascar, Erik is back on the trail of his lemur troop.
They're not so far, you know.
No, they are down here.
But I think I can see William.
Yeah.
You can see William.
William is now five months old.
He's happy to stray further from Mum and he's beginning to meet the rest of the troop.
Silkies use grooming to get to know each other, but William's having none of it.
He just won't sit still.
The juveniles arrive to check him out and try their luck at grooming him.
Finally, one manages to groom William's tail with his special tooth comb.
But only for a second.
Then he escapes and leaps back to the safety of Mum.
Happy that William is doing well, Erik can follow up a promising lead outside Marojejy.
He's travelled 60 miles south to the Antainambalana River.
We've been waiting for our third boat.
Of course, none of them have roofs or rain covers, but we're used to that.
Two troops of silkies have been spotted in another protected rainforest which has suffered serious logging.
It's an important breakthrough for Erik.
By setting up a new research base in this disturbed forest, Erik hopes his presence will protect these groups.
This is conservation on the frontline.
We have an opportunity here to learn how silky sifakas cope with habitat disturbance.
We're in a much lower elevation forest, with a sharp habitat edge.
We don't know what they eat, or why they'd be living here.
There are no other groups nearby.
By capturing them, we'd be able to place a radio collar on one or two individuals, which will allow us to find the group each and every day and collect sufficient data to understand how they are surviving here.
And to assist him, Erik has hand-picked an international team of lemur experts.
A huge amount of planning has taken place.
We've been organising things for months.
We're lucky to have a dream team here.
Once off the boats, there's a four-hour walk further up river.
Then a climb into the dense jungle, up above the valley floor.
As night falls, they must set up camp by torchlight.
Sascha's undercover team touch down in the northern Madagascan town of Antalaha.
It didn't take long for the operation to get going.
It turned out that, you know, you just show up and they'll find you, if you show up as a trader, and that's what happened to us.
We sat down in this beautiful restaurant, watching the humpback whales breach just beyond the reef, had a drink and said, "We are here looking for good ebony.
" And then the next day, we were talking to Roger Thunam.
Roger Thunam was a major player in the ebony and rosewood export business, owning several extensive logging yards.
This meeting was the first vital step in Sascha's case.
We found ourselves sitting in Mr Thunam's office, on our, basically, first day of real work and having a conversation with him.
So we had to pass muster, and it was not easy.
He put us through our paces and asked us about the size of our company, how much we would want, and is it worthwhile for him? But because we passed the test, then things really opened up for us, because he was the top boss, and when we were done and he pointed down into the yard and said, "Hey, you guys, "take care of these guys," that's all they needed to know.
The boss had said yes.
They took the chance to find out from Thunam's men where they had been cutting, and it quickly became clear the logs were from inside Masoala National Park, only 80 miles from Erik's rainforest.
But Sascha needed hard evidence, so he used his fake identity and claimed he wanted to see the quality of the ebony on offer before he was prepared to buy.
So Thunam's cutters took him deep into the protected jungle.
If Sascha blew his cover now, he'd have a five-day trek to safety.
We were led and were in the hands of the, sort of, lead illegal logger, and we were brought by the loggers themselves to stumps that they had cut, to the live trees that they were planning to cut.
All right, here's an ebony tree.
A large one ready to cut, the right size to cut, and this is the type, our logger friend tells us, which is the pure black variety that has the highest value for the instrument market.
Every step along the trail, Sascha was collecting solid evidence for his case, documenting with video, collecting GPS locations of stumps and trees, and detailing the impact the illegal loggers had on the wildlife in the National Park.
HE SPEAKS IN NATIVE TONGUE Red ruffed lemur.
Yeah.
He hunts those as well? It was extraordinary to see that park, you know, in a way that you normally don't get to see it.
But you have a quick sense of how this World Heritage Site is going to be gone in its form and what makes it a World Heritage Site, and its habitat for lemurs, very quickly at that rate.
You could see it, sort of, collapsing from the inside in front of you and it was heart-breaking.
After three days in the forest, we're coming out of Masoala National Park, again following the same route as the wood, now flowing out towards the sea.
Any trip that you do up one of the rivers that comes out of the National Park, you will go into a stream of boats with logs coming the other way, and we saw about 200 logs coming out of the National Park a day.
The loggers had given Sascha essential evidence, but it was just the first link in the chain.
He would need more answers before he had a case.
Morning reveals Erik's camp.
Trackers who have been scouting for both new silky troops bring in the news that they have only located one.
Where they expected to find the second group, they encountered only traps and some logging.
It may be that for these seven silkies, Erik has come too late.
It makes it all the more urgent that today, they track down the remaining group of four and dart them.
Darting is the safest way to catch the lemurs.
This will give Erik the chance to give them a health check and fit radio collars.
But finding them means yet another slippery trek through steep, tangled terrain.
ERIK SPEAKS IN LOCAL TONGUE Erik identifies the adult male.
The dart must hit the silky in the thigh, so taking the shot is not so easy.
Once darted, there's a scramble to get nets under the silky for a clean catch.
I'm speechless, you know.
We always see them through the binoculars, and we talk about them all day and collect data on them, but to see them up close and to touch them is magical.
They're so warm.
I can almost feel his heartbeat.
It's very emotional to see these animals come down.
I'm not used to it.
I never handle these animals.
We're about an hour from camp, up and down a few hills.
It's a mud slide out there and I'm not going to slide with This is more precious than anything I've had in my arms in ten years.
To keep the lemur safe and calm, it's placed into a pillow case.
And with one down, there's three to go.
THEY SPEAK IN NATIVE TONGUE It's a young female we have here, so it all went so well, and she's just gorgeous, you know.
Yeah.
They're so soft and they're such gentle creatures.
With two down, Erik heads back to the camp, leaving the darting team to bring in the last two.
Whoa! We've got a beautiful female and she's so healthy.
The lab team get to work, beginning with the adult male.
110 on the pulse, Sam.
Yep.
They take blood samples and medical checks that will give Erik a health record for the troop.
Got a little tartar on his teeth, but moderate wear.
Eyes and nose are clear.
This is, to me, the most remarkable.
They can really just grab onto trees so easily with these.
If I could have one thing that the sifaka has, it would be a big toe like this.
I think humans have devolved a little.
They have this over us.
We'd have to redesign shoes, but it would be worth it.
He's going through the woods, he's having a dream, catching those trees and bouncing.
Some people say that only humans are ticklish.
That's false.
Yeah.
The final task is to fit a radio collar, so the male can be tracked anywhere in the forest.
There are moments when one can't help feel like a 19th-century Victorian hunter, shooting animals out of the trees, but then when it's all over, you realise that it's for the good of the species.
This individual's contributing so much.
He's maybe the 20th silky that has ever been captured.
And only the fourth or fifth to ever wear a radio collar.
This is the only silky sifaka group that we'll know well living in a disturbed forest, and we need to know what their strategies are.
They're on the edge of extinction, so we need to act fast, and we're doing that.
The male is placed back in his pillow case to recover and hung on the edge of the camp, in the shade, for peace and quiet.
Then they turn their attention to the female.
And there's a wonderful revelation.
Hear it? Yeah.
Go, babe.
She's pregnant.
Oh, my goodness! I'm optimistic that the baby will have a much greater chance of survival now that our team is here.
You know, infant mortality is so high, but as we start to watch them every day, this infant's going to make it.
Fantastic.
She looks beautiful.
Break out the cigars.
Yeah.
That's good.
Population's growing.
Yeah.
After a couple of hours, all the troop has been checked and it's time for their release.
So there is my friend.
Jump up.
Are you ready to jump? Oh Be careful, be careful.
Erik now knows the troop is one male and three females, with a birth expected this year to take their number to five.
We've already had a lot of success here in the past few days, and our presence here will lead to the permanent safety of this group.
We will become the guardians of this forest.
And the forest was definitely in need of guardians.
Sascha returned to Thunam's sawmill to look for clues and was shocked by the scale of the operation, since the cutting of any rosewood or ebony has been illegal here since 2006.
We saw his warehouse, which was filled with rosewood logs.
The workers were being paid a few dollars a day.
It was Thunam who was making the serious money, when the wood was sold for export.
And it didn't take Sascha long to find the most vital evidence of all.
The plain ebony blanks will ultimately form the fronts of the neck of a guitar, but it wasn't just the odd one, this was a production line.
If you were buying wood from Madagascar andthe answer is - it's being cut in the National Park, on the first day of us asking questions, it begs the question of what did the guys who were actually exporting that stuff ask? And it was not hard to find out.
Sascha now believed he could prove that Thunam's ebony operation was illegal and some of that wood was going into guitars.
But the next question was - who was buying it and where did it end up? For the answers, he had to go back to America.
Erik has returned home to Marojejy.
This forest is defined by the rain.
Always wet and often drenched.
All of the animals here have to get used to it.
Including William.
He's becoming independent and no longer has Mum to snuggle up to.
As soon as the storm has passed, the troop slowly moves on, and William follows.
But for Madagascar's jungle birds, there's greater urgency.
It's time for nest building.
A male Paradise Flycatcher plucks cobwebs .
.
and, together with his russet mate, creates a thimble-sized nest.
The Common Sunbird-asity uses its elegantly curved beak to weave together dangling moss.
Here, it's the female who does the work, while the blue-headed male looks on.
Even at camp, Madagascan Wagtails take advantage of a ledge.
They'll stay for just a few weeks.
But a confident Banded Mongoose is a regular visitor always on the look-out for scraps.
For Erik's silky troop, four months have passed.
William has doubled in size and his challenge now is to keep up with the troop, but his judgement isn't always perfect.
His dexterity has improved and he's learnt how to tackle the abundant forest fruits.
And he's not afraid to take on the older juveniles.
He's only eight months old and it's a bit risky to be wrestling with a 20-month-old about twice his size.
Sometimes, infants do fall to the ground when they're in these rather aggresive, lengthy, play-wrestling bouts.
Certainly, the 20-month-old was not wrestling as intensely as he usually does.
It seemed like the two-year-old was toning it down a little bit.
Silky safaka play is remarkable, complex and detailed.
We could bring a wrestling coach out here and they could actually score headlocks, pins, flips, tosses across the shoulder, and there'd be some new moves that silkies could do that they wouldn't know how to score.
Like the hanging upside down by one foot, grabbing the tail of another one and putting it in your mouth and biting them.
That would be a silky-only move.
Yeah.
William may not win every round yet, but he's well on the way to holding his own.
Half a world away from Madagascar, Sascha was back in Washington, poring over the paper trail from Thunam's logging empire.
Most of his exports were going to China, but Sascha also found it was coming to a very famous company in the United States.
We were able to show very clearly that the wood was going from Thunam to Germany and then to Gibson, in this case, in the United States.
Gibson is an iconic American guitar-maker, and it looked like Sascha's evidence could contribute to the first test case of the new Lacey Act.
When we were done with the investigation, we published forms of that information - not all the details - in a public report, and then shortly after that, a raid occurred, here in the United States, of the Gibson headquarters.
Gibson is based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Federal Agents picked up Sascha's report and took over the case.
They raided the company and seized a shipment of Madagascan ebony fingerboards, guitars and paperwork, as further evidence.
Gibson's boss, Henry Juszkiewicz, was taken aback.
They came in with weapons, they shut down our company, they cost us millions of dollars.
But Gibson's Chief Executive does have a view on Madagascar.
Madagascar is a pretty screwed-up place.
OK, there is no doubt that bad things are happening in Madagascar.
They've had three coups, the people are in utter poverty.
Now, I knew that illegal logging was taking place, that's well-known, and, you know, it probably is having an impact on wildlife.
I think it should be stopped.
Even so, Juszkiewicz argues Gibson didn't know and didn't ask where their Madagascan ebony was coming from.
We were buying through an intermediary in Germany.
We didn't know we were getting wood from a Roger Thunam.
That's sort of beyond the level of our understanding and buying.
We typically don't go that deeply into it.
Yet case records allegedly show that a Gibson employee had known of Roger Thunam and that he could supply ebony on the grey market.
But Mr Juszkiewicz maintains their innocence.
There was nothing that we have seen at this point that would indicate that, you know, the load of wood that we bought had any illegality.
And, in fact, as soon as the raid took place, we ceased buying any wood from Madagascar.
Since the raid, Gibson has been under investigation, and in June 2011, related court proceedings began, though Gibson have not been charged with violating the new Lacey Act.
But however the court case eventually pans out, Sascha has already seen concrete success.
As soon as the raid happened, it caused a sea-change, I think it's fair to say, in the guitar industry and the music industry around the world.
It is very difficult today to find Madagascar ebony in the music instrument sector.
And that is an extraordinarily important signal for now moving forward and having an actual effect on the ground where Erik is working.
And the signal reverberated around the world.
Countries sat up and took notice of the US position.
Sascha took his undercover fight to China - the biggest importer of illegal precious hardwoods.
If he could stop them, then there would be breathing space for Erik's work and the lemurs would have their best chance.
And Sascha sent Erik what he discovered.
The secret camera has gone to China.
And we have some new video of what happens to Madagascar rosewood when it goes into China.
Regardez.
They have gone to a furniture store and the entire floor is covered with rosewood furniture from Madagascar for the rich of China, made from Madagascar rosewood.
This is one bed.
One bed.
What can you buy for two billion ariary? Voila! And only one percent of that money, even less, has stayed in Madagascar.
It's ridiculous.
Sascha's undercover video has provoked the Chinese government into taking action and, for the first time, Chinese wood traders are feeling the heat.
In some of our undercover discussions with traders in China, we are hearing that some of them are being arrested, and some are having to pay very large fines.
There is friction, for the first time, for the flow of the bleeding of the rosewood out of Madagascar's National Parks.
Sascha's investigation has broken through a wall of ignorance by making big companies sit up and take responsibility for wood they use.
It's a victory against the odds and only the first of many battles he will take on to save the rainforests.
For the moment, the export of rosewood and ebony from Madagascar is almost at a standstill and the big logging camps within the National Parks are a thing of the past.
Encouragingly, Marojejy is quiet.
For Erik, it's been a momentous year.
His silky troop have flourished .
.
and particularly William.
William's really changed throughout this first year.
I mean, it's amazing how independent he became.
From an infant, you know, the size of a small rat, you know, tucked in his mother's belly.
Just a year later, he's coming into his own now, looking strong and healthy.
It's amazing how fast they change.
Erik's success reaches beyond William's troop.
His intrepid surveys have found 40 new silkies - giving a massive boost to the known population in just one year.
The darted group that Erik saved are going strong, including their precious new arrival.
And Erik won't rest while there are more silkies to be found in Madagascar.
He remains their dedicated protector.
It's inconceivable what this place would be like without silkies.
You know, it would just be an empty forest.
They're more than just one species that lives here, they are the heart of this place.
They are simply the soul of this forest.
How could we not, you know, spend our lifetime protecting it?
This is William.
At just four months old, he's the latest addition to a troop of these endangered lemurs.
He is the hope for a species in trouble.
And his future is in the hands of two men from two very different worlds.
A dedicated scientist has joined forces with an undercover detective.
Their aim - to try and save the silky sifakas.
Madagascar is the most exclusive of islands.
Over 80% of its wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth.
And it's home to our most primitive primate cousins - the lemurs.
Over 80 species have adapted to the island's diverse landscapes.
But the greatest variety live in the tropical rainforests that cling to the mountains.
Here, there are still lost worlds yet to be explored.
They are the last refuge of one of the rarest of all lemurs .
.
the silky sifaka.
It's these elusive primates that have drawn biologist Erik Patel to the mountains of Marojejy.
His day begins at dawn.
The early mornings can be hard.
At 4:30, you're waking up in the dark.
Nothing's dry, you're putting on the same wet clothes, and I find that if I can get to my cup of coffee in the morning, I'm OK.
Erik came from Chicago ten years ago, to begin the world's first study of silkies.
It's a far cry from home.
Every morning, leeches on the eyeballs, scorpions in the toilet and poisonous centipedes dangling from the bungalows.
Those would be the top three joys of working here.
Many would have given up, but he's braved the isolation, built a camp and a dedicated team.
Erik's determined, but his challenge is immense.
With as few as 300 silkies left, Erik's research is vital to save them from extinction.
But even finding them in this steep mountainous rainforest is tough.
He works with a local team of specialist trackers.
And they don't use walkie-talkies to keep in touch.
HE MAKES ANIMAL CRY CRY ECHOES The reply comes from a guide who's been out since 2am.
It draws them closer.
When Erik first arrived, the silkies lived up to their local name as ghosts of the forest .
.
and always fled.
But a decade later, one troop easily accepts his presence.
Silky sifakas are just beautiful, shy, social, and such vulnerable creatures.
You know, they hardly fight at all.
They spend huge amounts of time just grooming and playing.
They're each very different from one another.
To gaze into their eyes for the first time up close is really, really hard to forget.
Before Erik arrived, nothing was known about silkies.
He's trying to discover the basics of their behaviour and how they use the forest.
Only then will he know what they need to survive And over the years, he's got to know these seven silkies like his own family.
We've got the adult male, his name is Lahi Vo.
It means New Male in Malagasy.
He's only been around for about two years.
He displaced our old resident male, who had been here for my first seven years.
But Erik has found the real leader is a female, now about 20 years old, called AF.
AF stands for Antenna Female.
She used to have a radio collar and we needed that in the first year to help us find the group.
But after a year,we removed the collar, but she keeps her name, AF, Antenna Female.
Also in the group is a second mature female and several boisterous juveniles.
They spend much of the day wrestling when they're not feeding or falling off of trees, as juveniles often do.
But Erik's favourite is the youngest - AF's baby, called William.
He was conceived on Christmas day.
They're so tiny when they're born.
They almost look like little rodents, like the cutest little rats you've ever seen.
They have this long skinny tail and very little fur.
And they're just stuck to their mother's abdomen.
They're, like, one twentieth the size of their mothers.
They don't even leave their mother for weeks.
Erik's troop lives high on the mountains of Marojejy - a National Park where rainforest wraps around ancient peaks and hidden valleys.
And the silkies share their home with many other Madagascan oddities.
Bamboo lemurs eat only cyanide-rich bamboo .
.
at doses that are lethal to humans.
No-one understands how they do it.
Pygmy chameleons hunt on the forest floor.
And predatory Helmet Vangas nest in the crown of a palm.
But silkies are the rarest of them all.
Silky sifakas are an extremely critically endangered animal, and there are only possibly as few as a few hundred remaining in just a small corner of north-eastern Madagascar.
And their diet is so complex - it's over 150 species, many of which are rare rainforest plants and trees - that they've never survived in captivity, they don't survive in zoos.
Their diet is just too difficult to replicate.
But it's not just their dependence on a healthy intact forest that makes them vulnerable.
Silkies give birth to only one baby every two years.
And the females are fertile for just one day each year.
So, every newborn is like gold dust, making William Erik's only chance to discover the details of how a youngster grows up.
It's such a pleasure to watch him exploring around .
.
but then always returning to its mother.
They must have some well-developed muscles at a young age to be able to hang on to those mothers as they're flying through the trees.
Over the next year, young William has a lot of challenges to face.
All our eyes and hopes are on this one infant.
As well as following their lives, Erik needs to find out if they're healthy.
He can't catch them, but he has a plan.
I'm hoping the silkies will defecate soon, because we need quite a lot of faecal samples to investigate the type of parasites that the silkies may be harbouring.
And he's particularly interested in getting a sample from William.
It can take quite a long time.
They do poop about ten times a day, but it's never enough, you know.
It's a bit like waiting for the bride tossing the bouquet of flowers, you know, we're all sitting here waiting for these precious poops to fall and then tracking them, trying to identify whose faecal it is, where it is on the ground and getting to it.
I have been pissed on in the face before and it burns, actually.
When silky sifaka urine hits your mouth, as it has mine, it stings.
Yeah, it's not a pleasant experience.
But it's worth it.
Poop is precious.
It's like black gold for us.
It's quite small.
Yeah, it's too small.
Oui, oui.
It's William's, maybe.
Yeah, yeah, it is William's faecal.
Nice small baby poop.
Good job finding it.
It's not easy to find any poop.
But to find those small baby poops - that's doubly hard.
After analysis, Erik will know if William is struggling with parasites, which may affect his chances of survival.
To save a species, you have to know how many there are, so Erik is constantly exploring Marojejy and beyond to places unknown to science, looking for new troops and putting them on the map.
We go by here.
OK.
From Andakata Yeah.
.
.
to Ambalazedna Knowing where the silkies live means Erik can pinpoint his efforts to protect them.
We're travelling huge distances with dozens of porters.
Camping in places we've never been, relying on local guides we've never met and exploring in forests that we're not familiar with.
But it's exciting, and it's fun to delve into these lost worlds, but it can be dangerous as well.
Sadly, his surveys often reveal no silkies, but instead, alarming signs of the threats to this fragile sanctuary.
There's a house here, this is a temporary logging house.
These men came here and they built this house so they could set up camp while they cut down a large number of rosewood trees.
Rosewood trees can be between 200 and 400 years old and they are some of the tallest, oldest and most valuable trees in the forest.
These things are sometimes booby-trapped.
Look at that.
Such a thing of beauty that can be contributing to the extinction of the silky sifaka.
It's ridiculous.
Fresh rice.
This is not old.
This is very, very recent.
I'd like to destroy this thing.
It might be really cathartic.
But I have a feeling .
.
it's better if we stay undercover for a while.
But if it's still here in a week, we should just come and tear it down.
It's not like it would take them more than five minutes to build a new one anyway.
Illegal logging reached crisis levels in Madagascar after a political coup in March, 2009.
There was a complete breakdown in law and order in the capital, and no longer protection for the remote National Parks.
Loggers and armed men swarmed into the parks, working in organised gangs for the timber mafia.
It was a gold rush to take out ebony and rosewood.
Each tree worth up to 4,000 dollars to the timber barons.
It takes at least five men to haul this incredibly dense timber out of the forest, gauging a trail of destruction.
Makeshift villages sprang up deep in the rainforest, hunting every animal for food, including lemurs.
For rosewood and ebony loggers, the value of these trees is only realised when they are dragged out of the forest.
And when you see the forest through the eyes of money and greed, everything changes.
The threat to the lemurs wasn't just from hunting.
The human disturbance could disrupt the rare mating chances for these reclusive animals.
The only way to save silky sifakas is to save the few remaining patches of rainforest where they are found.
It can be that simple, yet it can be so difficult to do just that.
With illegal logging on his doorstep, Erik was forced to make a choice - whether to remain a silent witness or fight back.
I didn't set out to study illegal logging.
The issue came to me.
I feel a sense of obligation.
I feel like I owe it to the animals to just speak the truth.
To just be honest about what's happening here.
We all have to live with ourselves and I don't think I could do it any other way.
Every few weeks, Erik must come to the nearest town for fresh supplies.
But more importantly, he can use the only internet cafe in town to share his information about illicit logging with the wider world.
And he's not alone - there's a whole network of people trying to expose the illegal timber trade.
We know exactly who's making the money, who's cutting the wood, who's selling it, who's buying it.
We know what's happening at the ports, in the ministries, on the streets, and even in the forests.
There are eyes everywhere.
We know exactly what's happening, even if we can't stop all of it.
And all of us take tremendous risks each and every day.
During the height of the troubles, Erik realised that the network needed someone who could take on the logging mafia and tackle international demand for this precious wood.
That crucial breakthrough came to him in a magazine article.
It was an inspiring biography about someone who had really worked undercover a lot, trying to expose and stop illegal logging around the world.
As soon as I read that article, I knew we needed this guy here, and he might be one of the only people who could get us out of this mess.
That man was Sascha von Bismarck.
He runs the Environmental Investigation Agency in Washington DC.
In Sascha, Erik found a powerful and determined ally.
Erik's battle is the most important - it's in the forest, but from there, you can't fight these forces in the international market place that are after the wood, that are making his life so difficult there, and I think that's where we come in, that we track the wood, find out where it's going.
Sascha could help Erik to attack the timber barons where it hurt - by stopping their lucrative export trade.
And he had a revolutionary new law on his side - the 2008 amendment to the Lacey Act.
This law means that for the first time, American companies can face heavy fines and their bosses could be imprisoned if they have imported illegal timber.
With Erik's evidence, Sascha knew he could launch an investigation into Madagascan wood coming to the States, and he was prepared to take the risks others could not.
Often, we found that the way we can help is that we can provide cover for those folks that are working really hard, sometimes risking their lives in investigating that kind of crime.
They can often use a group like us to get the information out and to do additional research to connect the dots, get the real names of who's really behind it.
And hopefully do something with that information that makes a difference.
To build a watertight case, Sascha had to turn detective and pin down specific, detailed evidence.
The investigation began in 2009 and meant he had to leave Washington and go undercover in Madagascar posing as a wood trader.
The preparation had to be perfect.
We have to set up an undercover company, a website, business cards and good back stories because you never know when it's going to get tough.
It can be very easy, very easy, and then suddenly very difficult and very dangerous, obviously.
So you need to be ready with a lot of details.
Sascha's mission to save the forests had truly begun.
In Madagascar, Erik is back on the trail of his lemur troop.
They're not so far, you know.
No, they are down here.
But I think I can see William.
Yeah.
You can see William.
William is now five months old.
He's happy to stray further from Mum and he's beginning to meet the rest of the troop.
Silkies use grooming to get to know each other, but William's having none of it.
He just won't sit still.
The juveniles arrive to check him out and try their luck at grooming him.
Finally, one manages to groom William's tail with his special tooth comb.
But only for a second.
Then he escapes and leaps back to the safety of Mum.
Happy that William is doing well, Erik can follow up a promising lead outside Marojejy.
He's travelled 60 miles south to the Antainambalana River.
We've been waiting for our third boat.
Of course, none of them have roofs or rain covers, but we're used to that.
Two troops of silkies have been spotted in another protected rainforest which has suffered serious logging.
It's an important breakthrough for Erik.
By setting up a new research base in this disturbed forest, Erik hopes his presence will protect these groups.
This is conservation on the frontline.
We have an opportunity here to learn how silky sifakas cope with habitat disturbance.
We're in a much lower elevation forest, with a sharp habitat edge.
We don't know what they eat, or why they'd be living here.
There are no other groups nearby.
By capturing them, we'd be able to place a radio collar on one or two individuals, which will allow us to find the group each and every day and collect sufficient data to understand how they are surviving here.
And to assist him, Erik has hand-picked an international team of lemur experts.
A huge amount of planning has taken place.
We've been organising things for months.
We're lucky to have a dream team here.
Once off the boats, there's a four-hour walk further up river.
Then a climb into the dense jungle, up above the valley floor.
As night falls, they must set up camp by torchlight.
Sascha's undercover team touch down in the northern Madagascan town of Antalaha.
It didn't take long for the operation to get going.
It turned out that, you know, you just show up and they'll find you, if you show up as a trader, and that's what happened to us.
We sat down in this beautiful restaurant, watching the humpback whales breach just beyond the reef, had a drink and said, "We are here looking for good ebony.
" And then the next day, we were talking to Roger Thunam.
Roger Thunam was a major player in the ebony and rosewood export business, owning several extensive logging yards.
This meeting was the first vital step in Sascha's case.
We found ourselves sitting in Mr Thunam's office, on our, basically, first day of real work and having a conversation with him.
So we had to pass muster, and it was not easy.
He put us through our paces and asked us about the size of our company, how much we would want, and is it worthwhile for him? But because we passed the test, then things really opened up for us, because he was the top boss, and when we were done and he pointed down into the yard and said, "Hey, you guys, "take care of these guys," that's all they needed to know.
The boss had said yes.
They took the chance to find out from Thunam's men where they had been cutting, and it quickly became clear the logs were from inside Masoala National Park, only 80 miles from Erik's rainforest.
But Sascha needed hard evidence, so he used his fake identity and claimed he wanted to see the quality of the ebony on offer before he was prepared to buy.
So Thunam's cutters took him deep into the protected jungle.
If Sascha blew his cover now, he'd have a five-day trek to safety.
We were led and were in the hands of the, sort of, lead illegal logger, and we were brought by the loggers themselves to stumps that they had cut, to the live trees that they were planning to cut.
All right, here's an ebony tree.
A large one ready to cut, the right size to cut, and this is the type, our logger friend tells us, which is the pure black variety that has the highest value for the instrument market.
Every step along the trail, Sascha was collecting solid evidence for his case, documenting with video, collecting GPS locations of stumps and trees, and detailing the impact the illegal loggers had on the wildlife in the National Park.
HE SPEAKS IN NATIVE TONGUE Red ruffed lemur.
Yeah.
He hunts those as well? It was extraordinary to see that park, you know, in a way that you normally don't get to see it.
But you have a quick sense of how this World Heritage Site is going to be gone in its form and what makes it a World Heritage Site, and its habitat for lemurs, very quickly at that rate.
You could see it, sort of, collapsing from the inside in front of you and it was heart-breaking.
After three days in the forest, we're coming out of Masoala National Park, again following the same route as the wood, now flowing out towards the sea.
Any trip that you do up one of the rivers that comes out of the National Park, you will go into a stream of boats with logs coming the other way, and we saw about 200 logs coming out of the National Park a day.
The loggers had given Sascha essential evidence, but it was just the first link in the chain.
He would need more answers before he had a case.
Morning reveals Erik's camp.
Trackers who have been scouting for both new silky troops bring in the news that they have only located one.
Where they expected to find the second group, they encountered only traps and some logging.
It may be that for these seven silkies, Erik has come too late.
It makes it all the more urgent that today, they track down the remaining group of four and dart them.
Darting is the safest way to catch the lemurs.
This will give Erik the chance to give them a health check and fit radio collars.
But finding them means yet another slippery trek through steep, tangled terrain.
ERIK SPEAKS IN LOCAL TONGUE Erik identifies the adult male.
The dart must hit the silky in the thigh, so taking the shot is not so easy.
Once darted, there's a scramble to get nets under the silky for a clean catch.
I'm speechless, you know.
We always see them through the binoculars, and we talk about them all day and collect data on them, but to see them up close and to touch them is magical.
They're so warm.
I can almost feel his heartbeat.
It's very emotional to see these animals come down.
I'm not used to it.
I never handle these animals.
We're about an hour from camp, up and down a few hills.
It's a mud slide out there and I'm not going to slide with This is more precious than anything I've had in my arms in ten years.
To keep the lemur safe and calm, it's placed into a pillow case.
And with one down, there's three to go.
THEY SPEAK IN NATIVE TONGUE It's a young female we have here, so it all went so well, and she's just gorgeous, you know.
Yeah.
They're so soft and they're such gentle creatures.
With two down, Erik heads back to the camp, leaving the darting team to bring in the last two.
Whoa! We've got a beautiful female and she's so healthy.
The lab team get to work, beginning with the adult male.
110 on the pulse, Sam.
Yep.
They take blood samples and medical checks that will give Erik a health record for the troop.
Got a little tartar on his teeth, but moderate wear.
Eyes and nose are clear.
This is, to me, the most remarkable.
They can really just grab onto trees so easily with these.
If I could have one thing that the sifaka has, it would be a big toe like this.
I think humans have devolved a little.
They have this over us.
We'd have to redesign shoes, but it would be worth it.
He's going through the woods, he's having a dream, catching those trees and bouncing.
Some people say that only humans are ticklish.
That's false.
Yeah.
The final task is to fit a radio collar, so the male can be tracked anywhere in the forest.
There are moments when one can't help feel like a 19th-century Victorian hunter, shooting animals out of the trees, but then when it's all over, you realise that it's for the good of the species.
This individual's contributing so much.
He's maybe the 20th silky that has ever been captured.
And only the fourth or fifth to ever wear a radio collar.
This is the only silky sifaka group that we'll know well living in a disturbed forest, and we need to know what their strategies are.
They're on the edge of extinction, so we need to act fast, and we're doing that.
The male is placed back in his pillow case to recover and hung on the edge of the camp, in the shade, for peace and quiet.
Then they turn their attention to the female.
And there's a wonderful revelation.
Hear it? Yeah.
Go, babe.
She's pregnant.
Oh, my goodness! I'm optimistic that the baby will have a much greater chance of survival now that our team is here.
You know, infant mortality is so high, but as we start to watch them every day, this infant's going to make it.
Fantastic.
She looks beautiful.
Break out the cigars.
Yeah.
That's good.
Population's growing.
Yeah.
After a couple of hours, all the troop has been checked and it's time for their release.
So there is my friend.
Jump up.
Are you ready to jump? Oh Be careful, be careful.
Erik now knows the troop is one male and three females, with a birth expected this year to take their number to five.
We've already had a lot of success here in the past few days, and our presence here will lead to the permanent safety of this group.
We will become the guardians of this forest.
And the forest was definitely in need of guardians.
Sascha returned to Thunam's sawmill to look for clues and was shocked by the scale of the operation, since the cutting of any rosewood or ebony has been illegal here since 2006.
We saw his warehouse, which was filled with rosewood logs.
The workers were being paid a few dollars a day.
It was Thunam who was making the serious money, when the wood was sold for export.
And it didn't take Sascha long to find the most vital evidence of all.
The plain ebony blanks will ultimately form the fronts of the neck of a guitar, but it wasn't just the odd one, this was a production line.
If you were buying wood from Madagascar andthe answer is - it's being cut in the National Park, on the first day of us asking questions, it begs the question of what did the guys who were actually exporting that stuff ask? And it was not hard to find out.
Sascha now believed he could prove that Thunam's ebony operation was illegal and some of that wood was going into guitars.
But the next question was - who was buying it and where did it end up? For the answers, he had to go back to America.
Erik has returned home to Marojejy.
This forest is defined by the rain.
Always wet and often drenched.
All of the animals here have to get used to it.
Including William.
He's becoming independent and no longer has Mum to snuggle up to.
As soon as the storm has passed, the troop slowly moves on, and William follows.
But for Madagascar's jungle birds, there's greater urgency.
It's time for nest building.
A male Paradise Flycatcher plucks cobwebs .
.
and, together with his russet mate, creates a thimble-sized nest.
The Common Sunbird-asity uses its elegantly curved beak to weave together dangling moss.
Here, it's the female who does the work, while the blue-headed male looks on.
Even at camp, Madagascan Wagtails take advantage of a ledge.
They'll stay for just a few weeks.
But a confident Banded Mongoose is a regular visitor always on the look-out for scraps.
For Erik's silky troop, four months have passed.
William has doubled in size and his challenge now is to keep up with the troop, but his judgement isn't always perfect.
His dexterity has improved and he's learnt how to tackle the abundant forest fruits.
And he's not afraid to take on the older juveniles.
He's only eight months old and it's a bit risky to be wrestling with a 20-month-old about twice his size.
Sometimes, infants do fall to the ground when they're in these rather aggresive, lengthy, play-wrestling bouts.
Certainly, the 20-month-old was not wrestling as intensely as he usually does.
It seemed like the two-year-old was toning it down a little bit.
Silky safaka play is remarkable, complex and detailed.
We could bring a wrestling coach out here and they could actually score headlocks, pins, flips, tosses across the shoulder, and there'd be some new moves that silkies could do that they wouldn't know how to score.
Like the hanging upside down by one foot, grabbing the tail of another one and putting it in your mouth and biting them.
That would be a silky-only move.
Yeah.
William may not win every round yet, but he's well on the way to holding his own.
Half a world away from Madagascar, Sascha was back in Washington, poring over the paper trail from Thunam's logging empire.
Most of his exports were going to China, but Sascha also found it was coming to a very famous company in the United States.
We were able to show very clearly that the wood was going from Thunam to Germany and then to Gibson, in this case, in the United States.
Gibson is an iconic American guitar-maker, and it looked like Sascha's evidence could contribute to the first test case of the new Lacey Act.
When we were done with the investigation, we published forms of that information - not all the details - in a public report, and then shortly after that, a raid occurred, here in the United States, of the Gibson headquarters.
Gibson is based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Federal Agents picked up Sascha's report and took over the case.
They raided the company and seized a shipment of Madagascan ebony fingerboards, guitars and paperwork, as further evidence.
Gibson's boss, Henry Juszkiewicz, was taken aback.
They came in with weapons, they shut down our company, they cost us millions of dollars.
But Gibson's Chief Executive does have a view on Madagascar.
Madagascar is a pretty screwed-up place.
OK, there is no doubt that bad things are happening in Madagascar.
They've had three coups, the people are in utter poverty.
Now, I knew that illegal logging was taking place, that's well-known, and, you know, it probably is having an impact on wildlife.
I think it should be stopped.
Even so, Juszkiewicz argues Gibson didn't know and didn't ask where their Madagascan ebony was coming from.
We were buying through an intermediary in Germany.
We didn't know we were getting wood from a Roger Thunam.
That's sort of beyond the level of our understanding and buying.
We typically don't go that deeply into it.
Yet case records allegedly show that a Gibson employee had known of Roger Thunam and that he could supply ebony on the grey market.
But Mr Juszkiewicz maintains their innocence.
There was nothing that we have seen at this point that would indicate that, you know, the load of wood that we bought had any illegality.
And, in fact, as soon as the raid took place, we ceased buying any wood from Madagascar.
Since the raid, Gibson has been under investigation, and in June 2011, related court proceedings began, though Gibson have not been charged with violating the new Lacey Act.
But however the court case eventually pans out, Sascha has already seen concrete success.
As soon as the raid happened, it caused a sea-change, I think it's fair to say, in the guitar industry and the music industry around the world.
It is very difficult today to find Madagascar ebony in the music instrument sector.
And that is an extraordinarily important signal for now moving forward and having an actual effect on the ground where Erik is working.
And the signal reverberated around the world.
Countries sat up and took notice of the US position.
Sascha took his undercover fight to China - the biggest importer of illegal precious hardwoods.
If he could stop them, then there would be breathing space for Erik's work and the lemurs would have their best chance.
And Sascha sent Erik what he discovered.
The secret camera has gone to China.
And we have some new video of what happens to Madagascar rosewood when it goes into China.
Regardez.
They have gone to a furniture store and the entire floor is covered with rosewood furniture from Madagascar for the rich of China, made from Madagascar rosewood.
This is one bed.
One bed.
What can you buy for two billion ariary? Voila! And only one percent of that money, even less, has stayed in Madagascar.
It's ridiculous.
Sascha's undercover video has provoked the Chinese government into taking action and, for the first time, Chinese wood traders are feeling the heat.
In some of our undercover discussions with traders in China, we are hearing that some of them are being arrested, and some are having to pay very large fines.
There is friction, for the first time, for the flow of the bleeding of the rosewood out of Madagascar's National Parks.
Sascha's investigation has broken through a wall of ignorance by making big companies sit up and take responsibility for wood they use.
It's a victory against the odds and only the first of many battles he will take on to save the rainforests.
For the moment, the export of rosewood and ebony from Madagascar is almost at a standstill and the big logging camps within the National Parks are a thing of the past.
Encouragingly, Marojejy is quiet.
For Erik, it's been a momentous year.
His silky troop have flourished .
.
and particularly William.
William's really changed throughout this first year.
I mean, it's amazing how independent he became.
From an infant, you know, the size of a small rat, you know, tucked in his mother's belly.
Just a year later, he's coming into his own now, looking strong and healthy.
It's amazing how fast they change.
Erik's success reaches beyond William's troop.
His intrepid surveys have found 40 new silkies - giving a massive boost to the known population in just one year.
The darted group that Erik saved are going strong, including their precious new arrival.
And Erik won't rest while there are more silkies to be found in Madagascar.
He remains their dedicated protector.
It's inconceivable what this place would be like without silkies.
You know, it would just be an empty forest.
They're more than just one species that lives here, they are the heart of this place.
They are simply the soul of this forest.
How could we not, you know, spend our lifetime protecting it?