Destructive habits

I was new in my village, sitting around doing nothing. A group of people walked by all carrying their machetes. It looked interesting. They invited me to go, definitely just being polite, but I was bored so I surprised them all and tagged along. My Malagasy was still downright terrible, plus we were strung out in a line tromping through thigh high mud, so I didn’t have time to ask what we were up to.

Off we went, quite a ways, then we stopped by some land clearly intended for rice fields. There were drainage canals in a grid pattern, and they all knew which parts of the land belonged to which member of the group. I assumed this was within the farming zone on all the maps I’d seen of the area.

They told me not to go far, and set of in pairs, leaving me with the older women (read – slower) and one of my friends as my babysitter in case I fell in a ditch or something, I don’t know.

It’s on the edge of a Dr. Seuss worthy forest, and the land was full of gorgeous ferns and reeds. We were sitting at what was clearly the corner of their land, where the canals intersected with a deep and murky pool fed from the forest of odd trees.

All the sudden the oldest tiniest lady in the group jumped up and starting whacking the reeds with her machete, saying something interesting because soon the other four women jumped up to help her. As usual, I wasn’t sure what all the commotion was about. Then a large bird flew out of the ferns just past them and darted back in a few meters away.

It was definitely a cool bird, and I was happy they had been so interested in seeing it. Then I caught on to the conversation, and I realized they hadn’t actually been so interested in seeing it as they were in eating it. Apparently it’s a tasty kind of bird.

We sat there a little longer, then the everyone else from the group came back and we moved back along the canal. We were on the upwind edge of the land, which hadn’t been important until they all pulled out lighters and started little fires all along the ferns and reeds on the other side of the canal. Pretty soon the whole area was on fire, and the wind carried it away. From all the  hooting and hollering I could tell this was a fun activity.

A teenager I’m friends with came back out of whatever smoky place he’d been with a dead bird in his hand. I have no idea what species, but it was really cool looking. Apparently it’s lungs didn’t like the smoke.

They got worried about me and my slowness in the thigh-deep mud and the changing wind patterns, so they sent me and my babysitter back to the village while they finished up. The machetes are used to cut down vegetation, creating a fire barrier to control the burn.

What I didn’t know at the time is that the whole area was in the process of becoming a new protected area, and they were burning it not to farm it that year, but to mark it as agricultural land and proof that they use it as such. This actually did matter in the later discussions on the topic, and unfortunately helped to decrease the area of land that falls within the protected zone.

A year and a half later with a German ornithologist from Mitsinjo, we were working with 6 of those same pyros to create transects adjacent to that land. These transects are used for monthly bird surveys they conduct on the local populations in the marsh, many of which are critically endangered. I now know the large bird we had seen that day is among the endemic birds of the area.