Bentaro the Stuffed Chameleon’s New Form of Camouflage
Traveling through the StuffedZoo exhibits, you may have noticed that our house chameleon, Bentaro, doesn’t exactly blend in with his surroundings very often. We’ll let Bentaro speak for himself to explain why:
“Most chameleons you see – and most of the ones I’ve known, live in trees. So, if you want to blend in with your surroundings, what color options have you got? Green and brown, right? Not bad colors, but for someone like me, who can chose to be any color they wish, it seems a little boring.
I’ve come up with a new kind of blending-in, called camou-voice, or maybe it was voice-oflage. . . Anyway, instead of blending in with my visual surroundings – the stuff you can see – I blend in with what you hear. I’ve been working on different accents, so that wherever I go, people will think I am a native. The trouble is, I’m a chameleon, and I don’t move very fast. So I haven’t been to very many places. All I know so far are the sounds and voices of other exhibits. I can sound just like the elephants, for example. I like to hide up in the trees, and imitate Ronald the Stuffed Elephant, and pretend that I ate all of Eugene’s cotton candy for the day. You should see the way Eugene runs over (Eugene hates the thought of a day without cotton candy), and the look of relief in his eyes when the pink-and-blue bale of sugar appears, untouched.
I play a lot of tricks like that on the other animals. I usually get caught, though, since I always forget to blend in physically. Some exhibits are starting to get upset, but it’s just so much fun.
If you take me home, maybe I can learn some different human accents, and we can play tricks on them about their cotton candy. I love expanding my repertoire.”
