3.July.2016 (Day 28)

Best…lizard…ever!!!

I’m just going to come out and say it.

No need to beat around the bush.

Today I found one of my gold-nugget species.

The crème de la crème.

My holy grail of Australia…

Frilled-neck lizard (Chlamydosaurus kingii)

These are easily one of the coolest lizards ever!

If I haven’t already mentioned it a million times already, I loved dinosaurs as a kid and Jurassic Park will always be one of my favorite films. If you’re some weirdo who has never seen the film, step 1: stop reading and go watch it immediately, step 2: realize that this is pretty much the closest I’ll ever get to the ‘spitter’ that iconically ate Newman.

Dilophosaurus

I couldn’t get it to cooperate fully for a picture of it pissed off and frilled out...

...but I did my best.

Beautiful lizard, grinning idiot

This poor thing really was put through the selfie-ringer and has officially reached celeb status with how many photos I took holding it, grinning from ear to ear.

Shameless selfie #12,476

Can you tell from my face that I was pretty excited?

This time of year they’re mostly hiding up in the trees and don’t get very active. I was told I had Buckley’s chance of finding one (which if you remember from Ozzie 101 means not good). Luckily for me (and unluckily for the camera shy creature), persistence paid off and I finally got my shot (or 8,000 shots, but who’s counting?). They normally only come down from the trees to search for food or engage in territory battles. If there was another male in the area, he was clearly the winner because this poor sap had to deal with an incredibly overzealous biologist feeling like a kid in a candy store.

Well done Australia, well done.

After posting photos of salties and now frilled-necked lizards it feels like anything else is pretty meh.

Tsk tsk though. I still saw plenty of cool new animals while out in the field last night.

Barn owl (Tyto alba)

These owls are considered to be one of the most widely spread animals on the planet, so I guess this might not count as super rare/cool Australian field work creature. But I still thought it was pretty cool to see. Barn owls mate for life, catch mice using their superb hearing in pitch black, and farmers find they work better than poison at controlling pesky rodents. Pretty kewl for a bird.

Striped rocket frog (Litoria nasuta)

Probably one of the best common names for a frog ever, they’re darn near impossible to catch (or get a very good photo) because they can jump a ridiculous distance whenever you get close. I hope you can tell from the photo that they have extremely long legs and have a pretty streamlined body. They can jump 2 meters (~6.5 feet) which is pretty amazing considering their size. It would be like a human jumping 32 meters (105 feet)!

Northern dwarf tree frog (Litoria bicolor)

These tiny little frogs can’t jump nearly as impressive as the rocket’s, instead they love to hide in the grass and call until you’re just without range to take a photo. And then of course they’re completely silent and I assume go completely invisible. If I didn’t finally have a photo I would have guessed there were vengeful frog spirits haunting me while out in the field.

Field work continues to march along. I’m not at 17/24 children’s pythons, 90/120 cane toads, and 38/75 water pythons. It will be nice to take a breather in a few days when I fly out to Queensland to collect my last population of cane toads.

Until then I have about 3 million frilly photos to go through.

Who am I kidding. I pretty much have to put up another one. #SorryNotSorry

Best buds forever