Exploring the 'Google forest'

Hunting chameleons is a night-time activity, but there's no need for stealth or even speed.

With the protection of darkness, chameleons give up on camouflage.
Sleeping on the low-lying branches of bushes in Mount Mabu, northern Mozambique, they're easy to spot by torchlight. White lizards with their eyes defiantly shut.
"We're not sure if it is a new species; I rather suspect it may be," Professor Bill Branch, one of Africa's leading reptile specialists, explains to me as we watch one chameleon standing statuesque on a branch.
For the first reptile expert to ever visit Mount Mabu, the hunt for new lizards and snakes is proving rather easy.
Of the seven species that Professor Branch has caught so far, only one is definitely not new to science.
Five years ago, few knew there was a forest here. Its discovery by the scientific community is down to a very 21st-Century research tool.
"I used Google Earth to locate all the mountains over 1,500m that were closest to Mount Mulanje in Southern Malawi," Dr Julian Bayliss, head of the cross-border conservation project, told me.
"Mount Mabu was selected through Google Earth as one of these sights."
Dr Bayliss's project, funded through a British scheme called the Darwin Initiative, looked for similarities between different patches of medium altitude rainforest.
When images of Mount Mabu were analysed, it became clear that there was a large patch of dark green of which there was no official record.
A quickly arranged visit to northern Mozambique confirmed what Dr Bayliss had suspected.
"It was at that stage I realised that we were dealing with what looks like the biggest rainforest in Southern Africa," he said.
Travelling with Dr Bayliss and a team of scientists on to Mabu, I saw what had so excited them.
Unlike most of the forests in southern Africa there was no sign of any logging or burning having taken place. The 7,000 hectares of Mount Mabu are in pristine condition. Read more @ BBC