Tanya Loos
With the warmer weather comes the emergence of our loveable lizard friends – the blue-tongues!
In the Hepburn region we have two species of blue-tongues. The Eastern Blue-tongue is the most widespread species and occurs across the top half of Australia all the way down the east coast to Melbourne and Adelaide. Eastern Blue-tongues have a distinctive striped pattern on their back which is very variable – it may by thick stripes or thin, and in various colours.
Pictured here is the blotched blue-tongue. Blotched Blue-tongues are cool climate specialists, enjoying higher elevations and cooler temperatures all the way up to the NSW Blue Mountains. In Tassie, the only blue-tongues present are Blotched Blue-tongues. Blotched Blue-tongues are our regular bluey here in our Porcupine Ridge backyard but I have seen Eastern Blue-tongues crossing dirt roads within a couple of kilometres of here.
Blue-tongues are very active at this time of year. It’s breeding season! These two were photographed by my husband Chris on our kitchen doorstep. It looks like they are fighting but this behaviour is actually courtship. The male grips the female like this as they get ready for mating.
Both Eastern and Blotched Blue-tongues are live-bearing, that is, instead of laying eggs like other lizards, the young lizards develop in their mother with the help of a placenta. Eastern blue-tongues have the largest litters and smallest young of all the blue-tongues, according to the Australian Museum website, usually about 10, but up to 19 young are born, each measuring 130-140 mm in total length and weighing 10-20 g.
When they are born, young blue-tongues are immediately independent and it is time to learn to feed for themselves, and importantly to hide from predators. They are incredibly vulnerable to cats at this stage in their lives, another reason to keep your kitty inside 24/7.
Should they reach maturity, blue-tongues are very long-lived, with captive blueys living 20 years or more and it could be longer. Your local bluey may have been at your house and backyard longer than you and your family!
Having a blue-tongue in the backyard is great for many reasons. They are charming and loveable. They eat introduced garden snails and other foes of the gardener. And they are completely harmless to humans.
But people also ask, “Do they keep snakes away?” This is a myth! The omnivorous blue-tongues have very different diets to our local snakes. Just broadly, copperheads eat skinks, brown snakes eat mice and rats and tiger snakes love frogs, so blueys are not competing for food, and if there are plenty of resources they will cohabit the same space. For example we have Lowland Copperhead and Blotched Blue-tongue both living happily here on our bush block.
Keen to know more about living with blue-tongues and other backyard wildlife? I wrote a book! A practical and wildlife-friendly guide for successfully living alongside our wild neighbours. Living with Wildlife: A Guide for Our Homes and Backyards explores commonly asked questions and issues about encounters with wildlife. The book is available at our local bookshops, particularly Paradise Bookshop who was the official bookseller at the launch last month! Please support our locals but if you need to buy it online, you can purchase straight from CSIRO Publishing.
A safe and wildlife-friendly holiday season to one and all!
Tanya Loos is a local naturalist, author and environmental consultant who loves to work in the environmental not-for-profit sector. She is the author of “Daylesford Nature Diary” available from her website or from Paradise Books in Vincent Street, Daylesford.
Have you got any nature questions for Tanya? Send them in!
