Following Scientists Into the Field

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It is the end of the rainy season now in Madagascar, which means it’s a good time for chameleons. They like it wet and warm. And that means it’s a good time for Christopher J. Raxworthy, who is studying chameleons, to be in Madagascar, and to kick off the Scientist at Work blog.

News and feature reports on science, well-considered essays, interviews — all of the ways we cover science — remain at a distance from the day-to-day experience of doing science. So we have started this blog to give scientists in the field a chance to describe what they do as they are doing it. We hope their chronicles of research and, perhaps, adventures and misadventures will give the blog audience a chance to be a fly, or perhaps in Dr. Raxworthy’s case, a chameleon, on a tree branch, observing what goes into the making of that research report, or that very slick nature documentary.

Christopher J. Raxworthy. Christopher J. Raxworthy

Dr. Raxworthy, an associate curator of vertebrate biology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is our first Scientist at Work because he is passionate not only about doing science, but also about bringing nonscientists into his work.

He has been to Madagascar to study reptiles and amphibians some 30 times since his first trip as a student in 1985.

The goal of this field trip is to learn more about the chameleon species on the top of Mount Marojejy, an almost 7,000-foot-high peak that is a three-day drive from the capital city, Antananarivo. The summit is reached by two more days of hiking, through tropical forest and bamboo thickets to an area of low-lying bushes.

Time now for the editor to step back and let the scientist start talking. Dr. Raxworthy says the best part of each visit to Madagascar is the first night in the forest, because it is such hard work to get there, and you never know what you will find. …