Hard to trick!

Well Anne who guessed first pretty much hit the nail on the head with her guess of " a lizard or iguana..." And most of the rest of you were pretty close with guesses of other scaly creatures

This mystery object was cropped from this close up portrait of a Shingle-back lizard. This was a guy I moved off a road in NSW about five years ago. They are slow moving with stumpy little legs so they definitely do not mix with cars.

We don't have iguanas in Oz (except in zoos) but the land down under is a kingdom of reptiles. We have 860 known species of reptiles hundreds of which are lizards, from tiny skinks a few centimetres long to giant 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) Perentie goannas (Varanus giganteus).

Anyway shingle-backs (Tiliqua rugosa) are a blue-tongued skink very common to areas west of the Great Dividing Range (and on dryer parts of the range too).
This is another portrait of an animal I moved off a road in the Grampians on my last visit.I think they are so ugly they are cute!
You can see from their shot tails why they get the name "bob-tail" which is their common name over in WA.

This piccie of my Grampians one shows why "shingle-back" is also apt.They vary in size quite a lot with adults between about 30 to 60 cm long (1' to 2'), most of them towards the shorter end of that range. They are one of my favourite lizards, and totally innocuous.
Relying on bluff to try to scare predators away. They pop open a bright pink mouth and flop out a very blue tongue to look alarming. The Grampians one obliged me with a show.
They have small blunt teeth, if you handle them carelessly they can bite, but their bite will not break the skin (it is like being squeezed by a pair of pliers). Certainly their bite is unlike dragon-lizards which I can attest from personal experience have a painful bite full of needle like teeth.
By the way all native reptiles are protected by law in Oz and should be left alone (but I can't help but move the poor sods off roads before they get cleaned up by a car.)
I have very warm memories of these guys, when I was a small child we had some living in our garden. That is a good thing because just about their favourite meal is a juicy snail.

Now I can see I am going to have to try to make the next mystery object much harder!

Pound Bend and a (Not) Drinking Lizard

More on the subject of lizards (drinking or otherwise) in a moment.

I’m not going to post any more of our Tassie trip today. Instead I’m going to yarn about a walk Deb and I did a couple of weeks ago.

A few weeks ago Deb and I had a Sunday to kill. We had a lazy lunch at a café we frequent called ‘Wild Wombat’. Then we drove to a Melbourne suburb called Warrandyte for a walk along a stretch of the Yarra River.You wouldn’t think you were in a suburb of Melbourne - here the river meanders through a number of bush reserves.
The lower Yarra is often very brown, but this stretch is usually clear. This muddy look is from all the rain we have had this summer.

We followed these rough stairs down to the river’s edge.There at the bottom about half of the river’s flow seems to be making its way towards the cliff face.I scrambled to the corner to show you why. Meet the “Pound Bend Tunnel”.The tunnel is an artefact of the gold rush period in the 1870s. Miners diverted the river so they could get access to the river bed to search for alluvial gold.
The faint circle in the middle of the piccie is from a stray beam of sunlight filtering down from above and catching my camera lens.

Then as I turned to look back up the river… I noticed a local was checking me out. Can you see?This guy is a Golden Water Skink (Eulamprus quoyii) I think he/she is very handsome. He/she is a medium sized member of this species probably about 20cm (8in) long.
They are one of around 400 species of skink lizards native to Oz (we have about 800 lizard species in all).
Now speaking of lizards.
Last Thursday I challenged you to guess what the slang term ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ meant.
The key to the phrase is simply in the first two words ‘flat out’. So for most Aussies ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ means ‘very busy’. Fair dinkum!