moloch
New member
My son, Nicholas, and I have just returned from a quick trip out to Windorah, Queenlsand. Windorah is an isolated town in the channel country of the far southwestern corner of Queensland. This area is a long drive from Wollongong so we spent many hours in the car and traveled a little over 4500km in five days. We hoped to photograph many of the inland herps and possibly find a Fierce Snake (Oxyuranus microlepidotus) out on the Morney Plains west of town.
Windorah is surrounded by red dunes. This year, the region has received lots of rain so the normally yellow spinifex (porcupine grass) was green and flowering.
For some reason, we did not find many nocturnal reptiles at all on this trip. The weather was warm, conditions were moist with recent rain and there was a new moon so the lack of nocturnal reptiles was surprising. We found a single spiny-tailed gecko while we walked the dunes at night. I think that it was one of the newly described Strophurus krisalys due to the two rows of tubercles on each side of the mid-line of the body.
One of the highlights of the trip was this beautiful juvenile Jewelled Gecko (Strophurus elderi). Nicholas discovered it after searching clumps of spinifex for an hour or so. I had a hard time seeing it at first even when it was not too far into the clump … thank goodness for Nick’s sharp eyes! These little geckos are not easy at all to find but I doubt that they are rare.
We only found a single Smooth Knob-tailed Gecko (Nephrurus laevis laevis). This female was very dark and quite different to those that I saw recently in Western Australia.
We found several Variegated Geckos (Gehyra variegata) on the trunks of trees growing on the dunes but I did not take any photos. On prior trips, we also have recorded Prickly Geckos (Heteronotia binoei) and Beaked Geckos (Rhynchoedura ornata) on the dunes but we did not see any this year.
Regards,
David
Windorah is surrounded by red dunes. This year, the region has received lots of rain so the normally yellow spinifex (porcupine grass) was green and flowering.
For some reason, we did not find many nocturnal reptiles at all on this trip. The weather was warm, conditions were moist with recent rain and there was a new moon so the lack of nocturnal reptiles was surprising. We found a single spiny-tailed gecko while we walked the dunes at night. I think that it was one of the newly described Strophurus krisalys due to the two rows of tubercles on each side of the mid-line of the body.
One of the highlights of the trip was this beautiful juvenile Jewelled Gecko (Strophurus elderi). Nicholas discovered it after searching clumps of spinifex for an hour or so. I had a hard time seeing it at first even when it was not too far into the clump … thank goodness for Nick’s sharp eyes! These little geckos are not easy at all to find but I doubt that they are rare.
We only found a single Smooth Knob-tailed Gecko (Nephrurus laevis laevis). This female was very dark and quite different to those that I saw recently in Western Australia.
We found several Variegated Geckos (Gehyra variegata) on the trunks of trees growing on the dunes but I did not take any photos. On prior trips, we also have recorded Prickly Geckos (Heteronotia binoei) and Beaked Geckos (Rhynchoedura ornata) on the dunes but we did not see any this year.
Regards,
David
