Madeira on Independence Day

April 25

Today was a fascinating date to be in Madeira— the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship and the start of the new Portuguese republic. Having seen the concentration camp in Cape Verde for political prisoners and revolutionaries, and after learning from our onboard Portuguese naturalist, the date had more meaning for us.  In Madeira, still an autonomous region of Portugal, it was a massive holiday, including block parties, lots of family picnics, marching bands, and an ultramarathon. 

We spent the morning birding, leaving the ship by zodiac before dawn, and the afternoon on a botany tour, both with a wonderful young local nature guide. Madeira is a diverse island. A local expression is “the Canaries have an island per biome but we have them all”.  We traveled from the relatively dry south to the cloud forest at the peak of the mountains to the lush northern side. Unlike the Canary Islands, which have no rivers and get the water from volcanic aquifers, Madeira has many rivers and streams and is installing hydroelectric capability. 

We saw two of the three endemic bird species (see pictures below). We were hoping to see a pipit on the far eastern side of the island. Unfortunately it was so windy that standing was a bit of a challenge— no wonder why they put the wind turbines on this side of the island. 

On the botany tour we learned about “island gigantism”.  There are no herbivores and few pollinators on Madeira, so plants grow larger and differently to try to attract attention. Plants like buttercups grow to be several feet tall with leaves the size of dinner plates. There are heathers that are the size of small trees. Heathers are the precursor to laurels in the plant sequence of the forests. We walked through two kinds of laurel forests, one high in the cloud forest and another in a protected valley. 

This trip has been a lesson in longitude and latitude as well as the local geographies. Having sailed mostly east (and a little north) till we crossed the equator, and then mostly north to get to Cape Verde, Canaries and Madeira, we will now sail northwest to the Azores. This has corresponded to a lot of changing of our watches, but tonight we will regain one of the lost hours (and then lose it again at the end of the trip when we fly to Lisbon en route to New York). It has also been a good lesson in longitudinal alignment— how far west Africa extends compared to Western Europe, how close to Africa Cape Verde and the Canaries are, and that the Azores are further west than Iceland! 

Pictured: leaving the ship before dawn, Madeira Firecrest, Madeira Chaffinch,