Aye-aye

Aye-aye

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The Aye-aye by Mark Carwardine

If you were to design the strangest animal imaginable, with a cat's body, a bat's ears, a beaver's teeth, a long bushy tail like that of a squirrel, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous, bright, beady eyes reminiscent of ET, you'd be wasting your time. It's already been done, and it's called an aye-aye.

The aye-aye is the world's largest nocturnal primate. It sleeps during the day, but comes out after dark to move nimbly about the treetops in the forest canopies of Madagascar. It has a good head for heights. It also has a positive approach to sexual equality because the females wear the trousers in the aye-aye's world, exerting dominance over males and having first pick of all the best sources of food. The males, on the other hand, can be incredibly possessive - even pulling other males off females while they're in the middle of mating.

They normally stay well and truly hidden, and are difficult to see, but can be bold and surprisingly fearless. There are even stories of them walking right up to flabbergasted naturalists and sniffing their boots.

Strangely, the aye-aye fills the same ecological niche as a woodpecker (there are no woodpeckers in Madagascar). It taps tree trunks or branches and then listens carefully, with its outsized, leathery, mobile ears, for wood-boring grubs under the bark. After opening a suitable access hole with its rodent-like, ever-growing front teeth, it proceeds to extract the unfortunate larvae hiding underneath with one of its elongated middle fingers.

Photo by Mark Carwardine

Once believed to be a rodent, it is unlike anything else in the world. It's actually a lemur and, like many other lemurs, is an endangered species. It suffers hugely from rainforest destruction - Madagascar's forests are being cleared to make way for agriculture and development - and it is often killed on sight. It is considered a pest in some areas, because it occasionally feeds on plantation crops such as coconuts and lychees, and is viewed by many as a harbinger of evil.

Its other-worldly appearance probably doesn't help. Nor does its rather alarming repertoire of weird and wonderful calls: grunts, screams and whimpers, as well as eerie sounds that can only be described as 'fuffs' and 'hai-hais'. Perhaps most of all, its large and striking yellowy-orange eyes make it look as if it is perpetually startled by something happening in a far-off world of which the aye-aye alone is aware.

It certainly doesn't come across particularly well in Malagasy folklore. Some say that if it points one of its long middle fingers at you, you are condemned to death; others believe that if it strolls nonchalantly through a village, someone in the village will die; and there is even a belief in some parts of Madagascar that it breaks into houses to murder the occupants by piercing their hearts with one of those infamous fingers.

'Aye-aye' was once reputed to be the cry of fear the Malagasy utter if they see one of these enigmatic animals. Sadly, these days, hardly anyone ever does.