Fauna

Like most island faunas, the Madeiran fauna is marked by the absence of land mammals and by a poverty of species in many groups that are widely represented in continental faunas.

Madeira received its native fauna and flora from Europe, and birds, winds and sea currents were the chief carriers of the animal and plant species that inhabit it. After what Darwin wrote on the origin of island faunas, no one dares to doubt that land molluscs and other animals can be carried by birds and even by sea currents, or that the wind is in many cases the carrier of certain insects, as it is of plants whose fruits or seeds are equipped with appendages suited to aiding their dispersal.

The presence of many endemic species in the Madeira archipelago may be attributed either to changes undergone here by the ancestral types of those species, or to the disappearance on the continent of forms identical to those that still inhabit our region. As we saw in the article Land snails, the archipelago has 131 species of pulmonates peculiar to it, and there are also other groups rich in species of their own, most notably the insects, which unfortunately have not yet been properly studied.

The land mammals found in Madeira were all introduced by man. The first settlers found only one mammal – the seal – which is still frequent on the Desertas (‘deserted islands’) but now rarely appears on the coasts of this island.

Birds, being capable of flight and finding it no hard task to cross the roughly 350 miles that separate us from the Moroccan coast, are well represented in the fauna of the archipelago. Altogether, very nearly 200 species have been observed, more than in the Canary Islands and far more than in the Azores, despite the greater extent of those two archipelagos. According to Father Ernst Schmitz, the number of species confirmed as breeding here is 36, with 12 peculiar forms. Of these, 3 – the bisbis (Regulus madeirensis), the chaffinch (Fringilla Madeirensis) and the long-toed black trocaz pigeon (Columba Trocaz) – are regarded by some as good species, while the remaining 9 are mere local varieties. Among the birds, some are regular passage migrants, others occasional visitors and still others vagrants. Notable for its commercial value is the cagarra, a native but not resident bird, which arrives in these seas in spring and leaves in autumn after each pair has laid a single egg in the crevices of the sea cliffs, chiefly on the Desertas and in the Savage Islands (Selvagens) group.

Among the invertebrates we find many arthropods, such as coleopteran insects, arachnids and other groups of that vast sub-kingdom, represented by species clearly distinct from their congeners in other regions. The same must be said of the land molluscs. Indeed, it may be stated of these islands, and of Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’) in particular, that few or no parts of the world contain so large a number of endemic species of pulmonate gastropods in so limited a space.

The marine fauna of Madeira is abundant and varied: some 250 species of fish have been collected in the seas around this island, many of them remarkable for the brilliance of their colours and the singularity of their form or structure. Among these species, the tuna and the black scabbardfish (espada preta) deserve special mention for their great commercial value; we shall deal with them in particular in the article devoted to the fishing industry.

The naturalists who, through their studies or explorations, have helped to make Madeira’s zoological riches known are the following: Richard Thomas Lowe, E. V. Harcourt, J. Y. Johnson, C. Azevedo de Meneses, J. M. Moniz, Thomas Vernon Wollaston, Dr Oswald Heer, Dr Auguste Forel, Becker, Father Ernst Schmitz, M. Andrew, the Baron of Castelo de Paiva, Dr Augusto Nobre, Adolfo de Noronha, Father J. G. Barreto, R. B. Watson, G. Busk, T. Hinks, A. T. Waters, Dr Alfred Merle Norman, Dr Albers, J. Gray, P. M. Duncan, I. C. Thompson, C. Darwin, Dr Fisher, A. Girard, Father J. da S. Tavares, Father Longino Navas, H. Hempel, Dr Langerhans, M. Lachlan, A. Fauvel, Alberto Artur Sarmento, etc.

In the appropriate places we shall endeavour to give an account both of the nature of the research carried out by many of these naturalists and of the works that some of them have published on the fauna of our archipelago.