Angels Of The Forest

Madagascar’s mountain forests are haunted by one of the world’s rarest and most beautiful primates, the snow-white silky sifaka.

- Mike Unwin

When the dawn mist lifts from the sacred slopes of Mount Marojejy, movement catches your eye: a flash of startling white travelling at speed through the dense forest canopy. It flits in and out of view like a wraith and only when it comes to a halt, framed in a gap, can you bring binoculars to bear. There’s no mistaking those long, slender limbs and pure white coat: it’s a simpona, or – to scientists – a silky sifaka. The rising sun illuminates the animal with a radiance that feels ethereal. No wonder locals know it as the ‘angel of the forest’.

It’s not always so easy to spot, however, especially when you’re craning up from the steep forest floor. “I was always hoping for cloudy skies,” admits photographer Ugo Mellone, who captured the rare images on these pages. “The animals are so white that an untrained eye can easily overlook them against the sky holes in the canopy.”

It doesn’t help that the silky sifaka’s home comprises some of the most challenging terrain on Madagascar: the Marojejy Massif, in the island’s north-east, rears to a height of 2,132m and its steep slopes are cloaked in dense forest. For years, this elusive animal and its hidden world remained shrouded in mystery, even to the few scientists who ventured there. “It was like being transported to a different world,” says Patricia Wright, conservation biologist at Stonybrook University.

Mistaken identity

It was not until this century that the silky sifaka gained proper recognition. First described to western science in 1871 by French zoologist Alfred Grandidier, it was initially classified as a white race of the diademed sifaka, Propithecus diadema. Indeed, by 1931 all Madagascar’s sifakas were thought to be races of either Verreaux’s sifaka or the diademed sifaka.