Chameleon break

I have had a lot of great coffee breaks in my time, but none of them compare with the break I had this afternoon.

My roommate entered the room with a copy of A Field Guide to the Reptiles of East Africa in his hand. “I hate to bother, but there is a magnificent chameleon in the tree outside.” I dropped everything.

I don’t know what I expected. I guess I thought he would be bright green and yellow and red and blue, with an arched back, a curled tail and flicking at bugs with its massively-long tongue. But he was none of those things. He was elongated like any other lizard, moving adeptly among the branches with a black body and bright green splotches – his coloration approximately the inverse of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. He climb down the tree toward us, and I moved in to get a better look.

On closer inspection, he was everything I had hoped he would be. His large barnacle-like eyes swivel totally independent of one another and in a full 180 degrees, so that you can stand under him and one eye will look down at you while the other jumps from one place to the next, then he’ll switch and stare at you with the other eye and continue to search with the first.

But the most exciting thing about him was his paws. They are shaped like a clasp, grabbing branches like a mitten - reminding me more of a sock-puppet or a Muppet than anything I would have expected to find in nature. His jerky marionette-like movements and the serrated skin along his back and throat only added to his Muppetesqueness.

My roommate, a biologist by vocation, suggested we pull down the branch and extract him from the tree so that we could identify him. I didn’t disagree.

The little creature hissed, opening his mouth wide and flaying his colorful ear-flaps like a creature from Jurassic times. And then the light-show began - it hastily turned yellow with a brown stripe, and later light green with aqua-blue ear-flaps, then bright green all over, then light green with dark green freckles. He morphed sometimes while staying stationary, and other times to change to his new surroundings as he crawled along the dirt or climbed up pant legs and cement walls or onto the palm frond we fetched that purpose.

Finally on the palm frond, he rested and took the famous chameleon shape - a shape which despite its purpose to camouflage gives the lizard's identity away immediately. He arched his back, coiled his tail and bowed gently in the breeze like a leaf.

My roommate identified the chameleon not as the mint-chocolate-chip-barnacle-muppet variety, but rather as the flap-necked chameleon (click here for photos).

Once our scientific inquiry was complete, we released it back into the tree from whence he came. He quickly climbed back into the tree, climbing higher and higher, and rapidly changing his color back to the mint-chocolate-chip pattern that camouflages him so well in that tree.

I looked down to ask my roommate a question, and when I looked back up, I couldn’t find the chameleon anywhere.