A juvenile globe-horned chameleon clings to a branch in Ambohitantely Special Reserve, a protected area in the Central Highlands of Madagascar.

CENTRAL HIGHLANDS, Madagascar — The flames were close. Moving like lava across the rolling hills, just a few miles away, a wildfire lit up the night sky with orange smoke.

I watched the fire from the edge of a dense forest in central Madagascar, a few hours northwest of Antananarivo, the country’s capital. It’s a special spot. This is one of the last remaining forests in the highlands of central Madagascar — a region devastated by decades of deforestation — and home to a raft of rare animals, including several species of chameleons.

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This forest, which contains more than 400 species of trees, only exists because the area has been protected for decades. It’s part of a park called Ambohitantely Special Reserve that has managed to limit illegal logging, clearing land for agriculture, and other forces that have razed the other forests here and across much of Madagascar.

As I learned that night, however, even the best forms of protection have a limit, especially as the planet warms.

Now, truly protecting ecosystems like this one — and saving some of the world’s most extraordinary creatures — requires a more proactive approach.

If you stumble upon a wild animal in Madagascar, there’s a good chance it lives nowhere else on the planet. Madagascar, a large island nation situated just east of continental Africa, has been isolated from other land masses for millions of years, giving animals there plenty of time to evolve into new species. That’s why around 90 percent of the country’s plants and animals are endemic, meaning they only live there — including all lemurs and nearly half of the world’s 200-plus species of chameleons.

Ambohitantely Special Reserve happens to be a hotspot for both.

On a chilly night in September, at the end of Madagascar’s winter, I walked through the forest of Ambohitantely with Fandresena Rakotoarimalala, a doctoral researcher at the University of Antananarivo who studies chameleons in the reserve. Chameleons are famously very good at hiding — their thing, of course, is blending in. But under the beam of a flashlight, they appear pale white, making them far easier to spot. That’s why we were out at night.

We walked slowly through the forest, scanning the foliage with our headlamps and batting away insects the light attracted. We heard the grunt of brown lemurs in the canopy overhead. At one point, we stumbled upon a tenrec — a spine-covered mammal that looks like a hedgehog — wandering around the forest floor.

Top left: Wearing a powerful headlamp, Rakotoarimalala, a herpetologist, finds chameleons where no one else can. Top right: A Perinet chameleon clings to a palm frond. Below: We saw dozens of these Perinet chameleons, also known as Malagasy side-striped chameleons, during a night walk in September.

Like many of Madagascar’s most iconic species, chameleons are in trouble. The island nation has around 100 chameleon species, and roughly half of them are threatened with extinction, largely due to a loss of their habitat, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, a global authority on endangered species.

That’s what made this night walk so special.

Key takeaways

Madagascar is a chameleon hotspot, home to nearly half of the world’s species.Deforestation is destroying chameleon habitat, putting many species at risk of extinction.Protected areas (PAs), including nature reserves, are a popular tool for safeguarding forests.PAs often fail to protect forests in Madagascar because they’re underfunded and don’t address the root cause of deforestation — poverty.Climate change is fueling wildfires, only making the protections that these places afford even more tenuous.

Every few feet, Rakotoarimalala, who’s been dubbed the Chameleon Queen, would stop and point at a whitish blob clinging to a leaf. Most of them were young Perinet chameleons, a small species with emerald green skin. She also found several endangered globe-horned chameleons, which have distinctive triangular heads. Their eyes moved around robotically, and in different directions.

In just a few hours that night, we spotted more than 60 chameleons across three species. And that abundance is one reason why Ambohitantely is worth protecting, said Rakotoarimalala, who’s studying the health and genetics of the reserve’s chameleon population. Losing this reserve would be a blow to the entire animal group.

The most common approach to safeguarding wildlife is creating protected areas, like national parks and nature reserves, which typically restrict activities that destroy habitat. In Madagascar and many other poor countries, these areas don’t have a great track record of success. People often have little choice but to turn to exploiting forests to survive, whether or not those trees are legally protected.

Ambohitantely is an exception: Managed by a private organization called Madagascar National Parks (MNP), the reserve has been able to limit wood cutting within its borders, partly because the forest it surrounds is remote, far from dense human settlements. The park is also relatively small, and that makes it easier to monitor.

But even that’s not enough to guarantee the reserve’s protection.

The main threat facing Ambohitantely today is wildfires set by people. Villagers in the surrounding countryside set fires for a number of reasons, such as to clear land to graze cattle or in an act of government revolt. And too often, the flames spread out of control. Between 1989 and 2017, the reserve lost around half of its forest cover, mostly to wildfires. In 2022 alone, fires destroyed roughly a third of the remaining forest, according to Jacquis Andonahary, a botanist at a local conservation group called Vahatra Association, who works in the reserve.

Above: A view showing the edge of the forest in Ambohitantely, where the Vahatra Association has planted trees. Below: These photos show firebreaks created by the park and Vahatra to protect the reserve from wildfires.

Climate change, meanwhile, is only supercharging this threat.

The maximum daily temperature in Ambohitantely has increased by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1980s. And rising temperatures can dry out vegetation, creating more fuel for wildfires to burn. “The length of the dry season is increasing, and hence there’s more stuff to burn,” said Steve Goodman, a biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History and vice president of Vahatra.

This problem is not unique to Madagascar. Climate change is making vegetation more likely to ignite in many regions of the world, whether or not it’s within a reserve.

As fires chew up more of Ambohitantely’s precious habitat, Vahatra scientists, park staff, and local workers are racing to build it back. Their approach is simple: plant lots of trees.

For a few years now, Vahatra has been restoring parts of the forest that fire has destroyed, as a way to sustain its biodiversity. (As forests become smaller and smaller, they tend to lose their diversity of wildlife.)

Making sure those trees survive, however, is complicated.

First, you have to plant the right trees under the right conditions. Andonahary surveyed the forest to identify the trees that grow there and the conditions under which they thrive (the type of light, soil, and so on). Then, Vahatra and workers from the local community collected the seeds, grew them out in a nursery, and planted the saplings on the edge of the remaining forest, nourishing them with compost. The survival rates of planted trees “have consistently exceeded 90 percent,” Andonahary told me. This is exceptional, considering that tree planting often fails.

Once the trees are in the ground, a team of scientists and local workers then tries to prevent them from burning.

The reserve pays people who live in nearby communities a modest fee to patrol the reserve and to look for signs of fire. The park also has water-tank backpacks that they can use to extinguish flames.

More importantly, Vahatra and MNP have surrounded most of Ambohitantely with two parallel rows of firebreaks — barren ground, free of flammable grass, that fire shouldn’t be able to burn through. It’s a simple solution that people, including Indigenous groups in the US, Canada, and Australia, have been using for hundreds of years to control the spread of fire.

The fire I saw that night in September never reached Ambohitantely — precisely because of these efforts. Firefighters working for MNP put it out, according to Ricky Tiavina Rakotonindrina, an MNP employee who manages the reserve.

But of course, there will be more of them. Climate change helps ensure that. So the question, now, is whether efforts to safeguard the reserve — and all the treasures it holds, some of which may have yet to be discovered — will be enough.

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