TAOLAGNARO, Madagascar – Gabriel Andriamanjaka holds the radiotracking aerial aloft and marches into a spiky forest thicket. Branches whip around his body as he pushes through in pursuit of his quarry. The beeps emitted by the receiver he carries grow more frequent as he closes in. “Found it!” he calls back to us, pointing to a basketball-size bush trundling through the undergrowth. On closer inspection, the bush is actually a radiated tortoise tangled in twigs and leaf litter. Its shell is marked with numbers: “053.” It’s a female, fitted with a radiotracking device when it was released in 2023 alongside hundreds of other radiated tortoises (Astrochelys radiata) into this 950-hectare (2,350-acre) community-managed forest in the Androy region of southern Madagascar. Andriamanjaka and his colleagues have been keeping an eye on the tortoises here at two-week intervals ever since. Gabriel Andriamanjaka radio-tracking tortoises at a release site. Image by Carolyn Cowan for Mongabay. As the monitoring team gathers around this particular individual, it turns tail and begins to negotiate a large twig. It loses its footing on the second step and stumbles. It shoots us a seemingly self-conscious glance, black eyes gleaming in the dazzling afternoon sunlight that easily penetrates the dry and spiny forest canopy. Tortoise 053 is one of 4,000 subadult radiated tortoises so far liberated into a handful of well-protected forests in the region. And there are ambitious plans afoot to release many more — some 20,000 over the next five years. Strong protection of their unique spiny…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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