Pygmy Blue Tongue Lizard

Australia’s Blue Tongue Lizards

Have tongues of brilliant blue

But the smallest of this Genus

Has a tongue of different hue

Rediscovered at Tiliqua

After decades thought extinct

In a trapdoor spider’s burrow

A pink tongued blue tongue skink

They live in spider burrows

In grassland never ploughed

And you can see them if you’re patient

And your voice is not too loud

A pink tongued Blue Tongue Lizard! I would like to see that. We had a great day out on the annual "lizard crawl" hosted by the Nature Foundation SA on Tiliqua Station near Burra. Here we got to see first hand these delightful but endangered small lizards that were thought to be extinct for decades before being rediscovered in 1992. Tiliqua adelaidensis is a fascinating small lizard that sets up home in an abandoned spiders hole in which it spends the rest of it's life. It only ventures out for small feeding forays on unwary insects before returning  home. They're definitely homebodies but home selection is tricky. You wouldn't want to head into a Trapdoor Spider or Wolf-spiders lair while the occupant was still there. Thank goodness for spider eating predators creating many abandoned houses.

Pygmy Blue Tongues were once common in the native grasslands in South Australia's mid-north but unfortunately for them this is prime cropping land. You can only imagine what the plough did to the millions of Pygmy Blue Tongues living out their sedentary lives in their spider borrows. Or to the spiders needed to dig fresh burrows. But not all areas were ploughed and rocky outcrops and other untouched grassy areas provided a refuge for the lucky few and the species has persisted. Just! The fragmented habitat is not ideal but a recovery programme is underway and a good understanding of where they are gives hope to a sustainable recovery. 

The Pygmy Blue Tongue is very cool. If you look hard into the burrow you will see the sharp yellow eyes in the shielded head looking back at you. And if you are really lucky you may see one venture out of the burrow to gobble up an insect. Or you can go fishing for them. A wriggling mealy worm on the end of a fishing line dangled from a rod is simply irresistible to a hungry lizard. Or to a greedy one for that matter! The ones we saw on the lizard crawl were sleek and fat and maybe getting just a few too many mealy worms. 

Climate Change

It’s hot and getting hotter

And there’s little we can do

As our ecosystems totter

And we sit at home and stew

Do we rage against the greed

That has delivered us this mess 

Or should we consider what we need

And tone down our own excess

As one of 7 billion

Is there really any point

To curb our wicked ways

While the others trash the joint

The problem with this thinking

Is that no one takes a stand

But we can slow the global sinking

If we work hard hand in hand

Behave not as others do

But as you wish they would

It is not what you can do

But about what we all could 

What does it really mean to be stewards of the world? Spare a thought for the animals living with consequences of our actions and you may get an inkling. I recently had a discussion about this with a religious friend with a human-centric point of view.  He truly believed that the planet and its resources were created and gifted to us by God.  He felt that we must be grateful for our gifts and be responsible stewards but humans should and must come first. He was not overly worried about climate change. 

The problem with this thinking is how much can we take?  Obviously there comes a point where the natural systems that sustain us will collapse if we take too much. This is the point which we go beyond at our peril. It unfortunately looks like we have reached this point even if we are not quite at the point of no return. What does it take to shake people out of their complacency? Even the news that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef is bleached is of not real concern to most people, or the collapse of world fisheries, or the global loss of biodiversity. They simply don't get it. They don't understand that the collapse of the natural world heralds our own demise. We can still retreat from the precipice but there are few signs of it happening. It's time we took this seriously.