The Mikea Forest stretches between the towns of Manombo and Morombe, running from Route Nationale 9 west to the coast and from the Mangoky River south to the Manombo. Its character comes from being a borderland. Here the dry deciduous forest that dominates farther north gives way to the spiny thickets of the arid south, and the two ecosystems blend into something that belongs fully to neither. Scattered through the trees lie several freshwater lakes, unexpected pockets of blue in a parched land. Among the largest continuous forest blocks remaining in western and southern Madagascar, it survives unprotected, pressed on every side by human need.

The Mikea are the people for whom the forest is named, often described as the last hunter-gatherers of Madagascar, though that label is too simple. They forage and they farm, planting maize and cassava at the forest's edge in the rainy season, then moving deep into the interior in the dry months to hunt and to live on those water-bearing tubers. Most are of Sakalava origin, but Mikea is less an ethnic group than a chosen way of life, one that people from several Malagasy backgrounds have joined. They live interdependently with their neighbors, trading forest goods with the Vezo fishermen of the coast and the Masikoro farmers and herders inland. Theirs is a culture of deep, practical knowledge, a way of belonging to a hard place and making it home. The yam that yields drinking water is only the most striking piece of a much larger fluency in what this forest can offer and when.

The forest shelters life that exists in few other places, and some that exists nowhere else at all. Two small mammals here, the rodent Macrotarsomys petteri and the tiny tenrec Microgale jenkinsae, are unique to this forest and were only discovered in the 2000s, a reminder of how much these woods still keep hidden. Among the birds, the long-tailed ground roller and the subdesert mesite found refuge in Mikea when they had nearly nowhere else to go. A 2005 survey near Lake Ranobe in the southern forest counted 59 species of reptile in a single area. And rising above it all stand the baobabs, the za and the rubrostipa, their swollen trunks holding their own reserves of water against the long dry season.

All of this exists without formal safeguard. The Mikea Forest is among the least protected habitats on an island famous for losing its forests, and the same pressures that have stripped so much of Madagascar bear down here too, from clearing for farmland to the relentless demand for charcoal. There has been movement toward protection. By 2008 a proposal for a national park spanning more than 184,000 hectares in two parcels had been submitted to the country's conservation authorities, and a 2011 government decree formally designated it as Mikea National Park — yet implementation has remained incomplete, with the forest still facing deforestation and fires. The stakes reach beyond the rare animals and the strange trees. To lose this forest would be to lose the world that makes the Mikea way of life possible, a culture and a wilderness bound together, standing or falling as one.