The Unofficial Airfix Modellers' Forum

Enjoyed some company on the beach this morning. Beautiful day; the local wildlife joined us.



The lace monitor is a fairly harmless big lizard unless you bother it. It is hanging around, scrounging food scraps. It feeds on small rodents, reptiles etc.
The Eastern brown snake (this one was 5 feet long) is one of the most venomous Aussie snakes, and came out of the brush, and then hurriedly tried to find a way back in! Thank goodness!
Not sure how it would have gone if these two faced-off!

Cheers,

David

Flipping heck how cool.is that!
Hope you enjoyed your breakfast mate!
I could never go to Australia because I have a massive fobia of Spiders!

That is really cool. Really fancy a monitor to add to my collection but would have to convert the garage into an enclosure,

My son has "pet" snakes, so I am not letting him see this. Hope you had a good day.

Not something you see in Milton Keynes everyday that's for certain!
The monitor I could cope with....... snakes not so much!

Can't say either of those reptiles are exactly common around these parts either, thank goodness! Excellent pics, David and I hope you're having a great summer

I didn't realise the Monitor's range went down into Oz - it's a magnificent creature though liable to kill you if it bites, although I suppose that's true of nearly every creature in Australia . Looks like you're having a fantastic summer, David, enjoy it.

Hi David, I have fond memories of a few beach breakfasts in Aus and NZ but if an Eastern Brown had come to any of them, that would have been the last one for me in Aus!!!!!

We have a few reptiles in our neighbourhood too but thankfully, I haven't encountered any for a while. We did have a bear trash our garbage cans and fruit trees a week or two back though.

David

Yikes!

iggie wrote:Not something you see in Milton Keynes everyday that's for certain!

You must be on about the sun right?

I'm thinking the lizard would be slow enough that I could out distance him in a hurry and I'm glad we don't have snakes. I suppose if you live near them, you are better equipped to know how to deal with them.
The most we have to deal with is grizzly bears and Cougars, neither which wants anything to do with us.

It's not necessary to be faster than the lizard, just faster than the slowest other person running away

jRatz wrote:It's not necessary to be faster than the lizard, just faster than the slowest other person running away

Good point, well presented!

I thought you guys would be interested.
As you can see, the lizard is beautiful to watch (I have seen up to 3 at a time at that location) and can be almost safely ignored. They climb when distressed, and are perfectly camouflaged against the bark on the Norfolk Pines on the beach. So you just have to ensure you are not the nearest climbable object! That would get messy.
That is the first big snake I have seen in Port Macquarie in 11 years, but they are around. This time, only our party saw it, and watched it until it was safely gone. So nobody else there had need to be alarmed.
No spiders to be seen at the beach, but plenty in the bush closer to home. We are about 1 km directly from the coastline, and plenty of nature around us in town, including roos (3 or 4 km away in less densely populated areas) and the occasional koala in our own trees.
If we are away from home for a month or so, funnel web spiders are in evidence, and redback spiders, too. They pretty much keep to themselves, and we don't go looking for trouble!
And all this in popular holiday location!

Cheers,

David

Only in our beautiful Oz Skypirate, stop scaring the OS people, things only bite if you bother 'em!!
Mind you I wouldn't want to try and outrun the monitor, no be upright around it when spooked
You're lucky you could be out side, where I live was officially the hottest place in NSW yesterday at 47.3 deg C poor air conditioner hardly kept up!