Great Southern(er) Land

In September 2010, I travelled down to South Australia for the Australian Society of Herpetologists‘ conference. This year it was held in Barmera, on the shores of Lake Bonney. It was a lovely location, and so popular that it was swarming. Literally.

Lots of midges at Lake Bonney, South Australia.

The weather was wet and cold, so there was little opportunity to look for reptiles while at the conference. The day after the conference, however, we were able to go on some field trips and thankfully the Sun graced us with its presence. The first destination was at Gluepot Reserve up in the mallee.

Mallee habitat in Birds Australia’s Gluepot Reserve.

This is a Birds Australia reserve and the reserve people had kindly opened up some pit-traps before we arrived. Overnight, the first line had caught a little mallee ningaui (Ningaui yvonneae). These pint-sized carnivorous mammals often get called native mice (even by biologists), which annoys the hell out of me – we have plenty of REAL native rodents, we don’t need to call every small mammal a rodent! Anyway… That was a new mammal species for me, but I’m reluctant to photograph mammals in situations such as these. They stress out really easily, to the point where I’ve seen them drop dead after being handled for just 15 seconds. There was nothing else in the pit line apart from some invertebrates, so we poked around the surrounding area. I saw a few mallee military dragons (Ctenophorus fordi), but didn’t manage to photograph any. Someone then raked up a Lerista, which turned out to be a species I’d seen many times before up in Queensland. Still, I managed to get some half-decent photos of it.

Eastern robust slider (Lerista punctatovittata)

Someone nearby chased a mallee military dragon into a clump of spinifex. A few people descended on the clump to try to gently encourage the dragon to come out and pose. There was a yelp of joy and out came something far more interesting, a jewelled gecko.

Jewelled gecko (Strophurus elderi)

I left the others at Gluepot and drove my little hire car very quickly to try to make it to the second field location. The two field trips were supposed to be running concurrently, but I was greedy and decided to to do Gluepot in the early morning and head to the second location afterwards. We had arrived at Gluepot much later than I had expected, so I would be pushing it to get to the second location before the host packed up and left. I’m just glad that my little Toyota Yaris could (hypothetically, of course) handle 160km/h. I arrived at a sheep paddock and quickly found the host. All the other conference participants had left already, but the host was still there packing up some traps. I had told her earlier that morning that I was planning on turning up at about noon, and she very kindly offered to hang around until that time. I unpacked my camera and she took me out into the field to show me the beasts she was studying.

Pygmy blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua adelaidensis)