Sorry, I have no idea why your birds are fighting.

I just stumbled across your website and I absolutely love it. I’m particularly interested in frogs and I’m the voluntary Coordinator of the Qld Frog Society for Rockhampton and Central Qld. Could I please be added to your updates list?

Thanks,
Bethlea

Your number one fan,

Stephen Michael Zozaya the Fourth

They were great runners, those skinks. The only one that gave me even a sniff left me with a pawful of prickles as it went down a crack. All I can say is it had one dark stripe running down the central midline, with one, possibly two more running down each flank; I don’t recall much, if any, speckling or spotting. I know this describes pretty much every Ctenotus ever, and my memory goes fuzzier with each passing month, but I thought them rather interesting at the time.

I don’t know what your Mareeba Ctenotus would have been, but I’m intrigued.

Big Mitchell Creek, which the highway crosses just near Lake Mitchell, yielded a couple of Ctenotus for me, one of which I’m fairly sure was C. robustus, but another I’ve tentatively called C. spaldingi (didn’t have a hand-lens so the best I could do was squint until I thought I had a decent idea of the diagnostic scales; have you ever been licked on the nose by a Ctenotus?). It’s also a gun site for White-browed Robin, which was why I was there; look out for them if you want to get your bird on, it’s a pretty special tick. There were also a couple of very heavily horizontally-striped skinks in termite mound habitat around the Mareeba Wetlands, though I could never get tabs on them.

Stewart