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.

This story is part of a series

You’re reading the final story of a three-part series on conservation in Madagascar, supported by the BAND Foundation.

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,........

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