It's a long way from Madagascar to Manatee County, but you wouldn't know it from the sight of the lemurs that make their home in the relative wilds of Myakka City.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 25, 2000

[Times photos: Jim Stem] A ringtailed lemur named Valgius lives on the preserve, situated among orange groves and pastures, a decidedly unpopulated area of Manatee County.

Most of the world's lemurs live on Madagascar, a foot-shaped island off the southeastern coast of Africa. Since man arrived there 2,000 years ago more than a dozen species of lemurs have vanished. Others face extinction.

Now these primates have a guardian angel, an ex-nun (among other things) who calls herself a "restless neurotic spirit." Thanks to her, some of the world's lemurs have been relocated a world away, to the piney woods of Manatee County.

Why here? Start with this: It almost never freezes, and the nearest McDonald's is 25 miles away.

MYAKKA CITY -- Try as he might this morning, Brian Grossi cannot locate his little band of red-fronted brown lemurs.

The others are all accounted for: The three bamboo lemurs are still locked in their cage, staying put until Grossi is certain they cannot get past the big fence around the perimeter, the one that has 7,000 volts pulsing through the wires at the top; the three ringtailed lemurs, turned loose the week before, are still too shy to stray more than a few feet from their cage, rising up on their hind legs, stalking around stiff-armed like miniature zombies.

But the five red-fronted brown lemurs? Gone.

They had been held in their cage since they arrived at the new Florida preserve in November. When Grossi opened the gate a few days ago, they hung around awhile like the ringtails but then disappeared into the underbrush.

Why hang around the cages? They had 13 acres of oaks, pines and palmetto to explore, a stream to drink from and plenty of pine needles, bugs and wax myrtle grass to feed on.

Grossi rattles some monkey chow in a plastic bucket, hoping to lure them into the open. No takers. He rings a cowbell, the signal for feeding time. The only response is the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker.

After an hour of searching, Grossi considers the possibility of escape. Could the red-fronted brown lemurs have figured some way past the electric fence? It's a scary thought; these lemurs are wild primates with a nasty bite.

Inside the fence, the only humans they will encounter are Grossi and some scientists studying their behavior. Outside the fence they would encounter Myakka City -- home to ranchers, horse trainers, bikers, marijuana farmers and more than a few people who, as Grossi puts it, show their appreciation of wildlife by "shooting it and putting it on the wall."

In other words, he's more worried about what Myakka City might do to the lemurs than vice versa.

And what would Penelope say?

Most people do one or two things in their lives and feel they have accomplished something. Then there is Penelope Bodry-Sanders, 55, of New York City, wife of a vice president at a prestigious design school, mother of two and crusader for Hapalemur aureus and cousins of every variety.

"It's been an odd career," Bodry-Sanders says, understating things more than a bit. "But what gets me up in the morning now is the lemur preserve."

From her cultured tones, you'd never know she grew up in a trailer by the Miami River, the daughter of a mechanic. She compares her traditional Catholic education to a finishing school, with corporal punishment. That's how she lost her cracker accent.

"I used to say, "Blessid are the nekkid for they shay-ull be clothed,' but the nuns beat that out of me."

She joined a convent with hopes of going to the Congo, but wound up teaching third grade in Chicago. She quit and joined a singing group she compares to the Mamas & the Papas, "except we did political satire."

In New York, they cut a record that sold maybe three copies. They also took their act to the stage. "It was a disaster. The New York Times loved us, but nobody else did."

Bodry-Sanders stuck with acting for 12 years, playing in everything from Shakespeare to a musical about the Vietnam War (Newsweek praised her for evoking "the perverse eroticism of the experience of battle.")

But stage work did not satisfy her soul. She volunteered at the American Museum of Natural History, the Central Park institution famous for its astonishing collection of everything from dinosaur skeletons to moon rocks. Bodry-Sanders rose to educational coordinator and lecturer.

Among the museum's most famous features is the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, the handiwork of Carl Akeley, who hunted with Teddy Roosevelt, killed a leopard with his bare hands and saved the Congo's mountain gorillas from being wiped out.

In 1991, Bodry-Sanders wrote a biography of Akeley, which fueled her interest in primates, a group that includes the big gorillas and the little lemurs. When she inherited a little money, one of the museum's top primatologists, Ian Tattersall, suggested she start a lemur preserve.

She founded the Lower Primate Conservation Foundation, and for the board and advisory council recruited some of the museum's renowned scientists, including Tattersall. The board also includes a close friend from her acting days, Blair Brown. Best known as the star of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Brown played a primatologist in the movie Altered States.

After two hours of searching, Grossi finally finds the missing lemurs.

They're nonchalantly hanging out in a spot he already had checked four times: the gigantic tent Bodry-Sanders shipped from Nairobi to Myakka City and pitched beneath an oak, the tree decorated with more than a dozen colorful Tibetan prayer flags.

The Tibetans believe that every time the wind blows through the flags, a prayer goes up to God. Bodry-Sanders is flying them to pray for the survival of the lemurs.

The last time she visited Madagascar, "as I was flying over, it was so badly deforested and eroded that the red earth was flowing into the sea so it looked like the island was bleeding."

Some lemurs are hunted for food there, but the larger threat comes from slash-and-burn farming that has turned more than 90 percent of the island's forests into wasteland.

Scientists have relocated some lemurs to learn how to save the species. About 500 of them, the largest colony outside Madagascar, live in North Carolina, at the Duke University Primate Center. The program has been so successful it has returned some of its captive-bred lemurs to Madagascar to repopulate the island.

The lemurs in Myakka City all came from Duke's captive breeding program. Duke's primate experts concede that the fledgling Florida facility has advantages over their own, starting with the weather.

Grossi came here by way of Duke. "They had 5 inches of snow yesterday in North Carolina," he says, a trickle of sweat on his brow.

The cold can be deadly. Several of the lemurs Duke shipped to Myakka City lost part of their tails because of frostbite.

Bodry-Sanders picked Manatee County because it's below the frost line, which means the lemurs should be able to roam the woods 365 days a year without freezing their tails off.

Myakka City's other advantage is isolation.

"Lemurs have an instinctive predator call," Grossi says. "When something big flies over they all scatter and hit the ground."

Duke's primate center sits beneath the flight path for an emergency medical rescue helicopter, which roars over at all hours, scaring the lemurs out of their wits. The only air traffic over Myakka City is the occasional sandhill crane. There is little traffic on the dirt road by the entrance, which becomes virtually impassable after a hard rain.

Orange groves and pastures surround the 90 acres that Bodry-Sanders' foundation purchased in 1997. The preserve will use only half its land for the lemurs, dedicating the rest as a buffer. It is not open to the public.

Although Manatee County's urban sprawl is creeping toward the preserve, the nearest fast food remains 25 miles away. Grossi, a 25-year-old Rhode Island native who lives alone at the preserve, clocked the distance to civilization on his odometer.

The forest on the property had been untouched -- perhaps, Grossi says, because the previous occupant did not want to attract attention.

"Apparently the guy who was leasing it before we bought it was growing marijuana and got busted."

To clear the way for the lemurs, Grossi trapped raccoons and other native animals that might compete and turned them loose outside the fence. A work crew installed an irrigation system in case of wildfire. Grossi and volunteers planted lemur delicacies: bamboo, mango and banana trees, passion fruit and guava vines.

They like Thriftymaid raisins too. Grossi squats with a few in the palm of his hand and all five red-fronted brown lemurs gather round. Their pointy noses twitch and they grunt at each other. Grossi wants to study how they communicate.

The males are flashy, with red crests that look like a punk hairdo, but it's the females that dominate their society.

Duke researchers gave all the red-fronted brown lemurs names that contain a variation of "red." The female in charge of this family group is Redlake. Her male is Akako (Japanese for "redhead,") who may or may not be the father of Redlake's offspring: Redwood and Strawberry, twins born in 1994, and Redwing, born in 1996.

All five live, eat and sleep together, with Redwing at the bottom of the pecking order, always hanging back. Because Redwing was born after Duke's big freeze, he is the only one with a full tail, shaped like a bushy question mark.

After polishing off the raisins, the five lemurs scamper into the branches of a toppled but still green oak, which Grossi says is one of their favorite hangouts: "It gives them great cover from the air, lots of room to walk around and plenty of places to huddle."

Sure enough, Strawberry and Redwing are huddled up, curled together in the crook of the tree, staring down with their inscrutable yellow eyes.

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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