In a couple of hours, he calls in over 30 species, many unique to Madagascar. They include several species of vangas—Red-tailed, Hook-billed, Pollen’s, White-headed, Blue and Tylas. If Charles Darwin had studied Madagascar rather than the Galápagos Islands, then the vangas’ diversity and distinctive beaks—adapted to specific habitats and food—would have made them, and not the finches, figure prominently in his theory of evolution.
Madagascar’s natural history, especially its birds and lemurs, is like nothing else on the planet. In 1771, French naturalist Joseph Philibert Commerson described it as: “[The naturalists’] promised land… Nature seems to have retreated into a private sanctuary to work on models other than those she created elsewhere. At every step, one encounters the most strange and marvellous forms.”
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