This letter presents VLA-MAC, a novel adaptive MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks that can achieve high energy efficiency and low latency in variable load conditions. In VLA-MAC, traffic load is measured online and utilized for adaptive adjustment. VLA-MAC transmits packets via a burst style to alleviate packets accumulation problem and achieve low latency in high load condition. Furthermore, it also saves obvious energy by removing unnecessary listen period in low load condition. Unlike current approach, VLA-MAC does not need to adjust duty-cycle according to load online. Simulation results based on ns-2 show the performance improvements of our protocol.