A lemur turned up in a plot we planted three years ago

A brown lemur was photographed feeding in a plot we planted in 2022 in Madagascar. It is the first time we have recorded one actually using the restored forest here, eating in it rather than simply passing through on the way to somewhere older and denser.

Lemurs need two things this kind of young plot rarely offers, fruiting trees to eat from and a connected canopy to move through without coming to the ground. A three-year-old planting is young for both, which is why a feeding animal, rather than one just crossing, came as a genuine surprise to the field team.

What it suggests is that the early fruiting species the Sahy cooperative favoured in this plot are doing their job sooner than we expected. We chose them partly because they fruit young, hoping to draw animals back faster, but hoping and seeing it happen are different things.

An animal that feeds in a plot also does work for us in return. Lemurs swallow fruit and carry the seed elsewhere, planting trees we never touched, which is the kind of self-sustaining loop a restoration is ultimately trying to start.

We are not going to overstate it. One lemur on one morning is an anecdote, not a trend, and a single hungry animal taking a chance on a young plot proves very little on its own.

But the field team has been planting these trees for years without seeing the animals come back, doing slow work on faith. So when the photo came through, they were allowed to be pleased for an afternoon before going back to the weeding.