The island of Madagascar is one of the most biologically unique places on earth.

I’ve been traveling to Madagascar since I was six years old. When I was eleven, I lived in Madagascar’s southern desert with my mother for a year while she was doing research on chameleons. We lived a seven-hour drive from the nearest telephone or grocery store, and witnessed everything from flash floods to locust swarms.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve continued coming back to Madagascar as much as possible. Most recently, Lily-Arison Rene de Roland (Peregrine Fund-Madagascar), Dale Wright (BirdLife South Africa), and I organized an expedition in collaboration with Biodiversity Inventory for Conservation (BINCO) to do some of the first biological studies in the Mahimborondro protected area in northern Madagascar. The expedition was documented by Kimon de Greef (kimondegreef.com) and Tristan Spinski (tristanspinski.photoshelter.com) from Aubudon Magazine, whose fantastic article is featured in the summer 2019 issue of Aububon. You can read it here: https://www.audubon.org/magazine/summer-2019/scientists-race-uncover-secrets-madagascars, and watch Tristan’s trailer for the article below.

Check out the following links to learn more about my research in Madagascar.

Learn more…

Our research in the Mahimborondro protected area was supported by the Bird Conservation Fund, the Peregrine Fund-Madagascar, and BirdLife South Africa.

Find blog posts from the team about our work in Mahimborondro on my blog, tagged under “Expedition Mahimborondro” (www.johncmittermeier.com/blog). Dale Wright also wrote two articles for African Birdlife magazine about the expedition:

Wright, D. 2019. A place to feel the clouds: Expedition Mahimborondro. African Birdlife September/October 2019: 68-70.

Wright, D. 2020. Raising Lazarus: on a mission to conserve Madagascar’s rarest birds. African Birdlife March/April 2020: 36-41.

Other work from my time in Madagascar:

Goodman, S.M., J.C. Mittermeier, J. Ramamonjisoa, and L. Rene de Roland. 2014. A note on the dietary habits of Barn Owls (Tyto alba) in the spiny bush of southwestern Madagascar. Malagasy Nature 8: 67-72.