For over twenty years on my journeys to the evocative forests of the Albertine Rift Valley in Uganda, Rwanda and Congo, I’ve searched for one of the smallest vertebrates on the planet, the pygmy chameleon. Crawling around at night, peering on the small ferns where they prefer to rest through the darkness, I’ve spent countless hours trying to find these almost mythical creatures. The pygmy chameleon authority of the early 2000s, Dr Bob Drewes, even explained to me how he’d found them on the edges of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, and taken some of the rare, early images of them.
So it was the most exciting moment when Ollie, on now his third visit to Bwindi, tracked down a real, live specimen! As we were all finishing dinner, he’d been out scanning the ferns along the dirt road before it fades into a forest trail. And there it was, his light picking up the glint of its reptilian skin. For though cryptic by day, if you get to the right spot, you can pick up their reflection with the flashlight. Serious proud moment for Dad, and a real coming of age moment where Ollie stepped up to track down this creature on his own.
