Thirty-one flap-necked chameleons, 20 of them hatchlings, have been rescued from their habitat - a construction site in Ballito.
|||Durban - Thirty-one flap-necked chameleons, 20 of them hatchlings just 3cm long, have been rescued from their habitat – a construction site in Ballito.
On Wednesday night, one last chameleon sweep of the site was organised by the Consciously Green team, consisting of Natasha Brown, Tammy Caine, Richard McKibbin and Nick Evans. A month ago, 40 chameleons were rescued and relocated from the same site.
Evans said Caine intervened to halt construction until she could get a group together to make one last rescue attempt. The bulldozers and graders were scheduled to destroy the vegetation last week.
“We got together a group of more than 20 dedicated volunteers, double as many as we had on our first attempt, and it paid off. It was quite a large area, so the more eyes, the better,” he said.
They started finding a few juvenile chameleons that were about a month old, individuals which the first small group missed. Then they started finding hatchling chameleons.
“We found about 20 hatchlings, which couldn’t have been more than a week old. If we hadn’t done this second sweep, they would have been wiped out. They were really small, about 3cm long,” Evans said.
By the end of the evening, they had rescued 31. These were immediately released within a kilometre, in a protected conservation area.
“Flap-necked chameleons, the region’s biggest chameleon species, have been getting wiped out in large numbers because of habitat destruction. However, they are still quite plentiful in appropriate habitats. Their preferred habitat is grassland, which the construction site was. Grasslands are used as a breeding ground,” Evans explained.
The chameleons lay their clutch of eggs, 20-60 of them, in a shallow hole under the ground. About 10-12 months later, the babies hatch, dig themselves out of the hole, and perch on top of the long grass stalks, making it harder for some predators to get to them.
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