Lizard hunting at Black Hill

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Introduction

This blog is about our two recent visits to Black Hill.

The first walk was a guided tour on the Southern side of the hill. Dan is part of the CSIRO Double Helix science club. This club is very well organised and has a stack of events to choose from and this was one of them. It was a "Herpetology field trip" to check out the Cunningham skinks - a long living lizard (30 years!) that is distributed through the Mt Lofty ranges. The trip was led by Peter Matejcic who showed us the tricks of lizard spotting. For example - one was the use of a mirror. By reflecting sun light you could shine strong light into deep crevices to see where the lizards were hiding. Another was to look at temperature - he had a cool laser tool that you could point at a distant surface and it would tell you the temperature of that surface (lizards like to bask on warm surfaces). Importantly, he also showed us where to look to find lizards (rocks with deep enough spaces to hide and plenty of lizard food near by). Lizard scats (aka poo) was also a good indicator that you were checking out the right places. We learned a lot about the Cunningham skink and how Peter had been conducting his research. Very informative and fun.

The next week we returned to Black hill, but this time to the Northern side, going along Amber Gully and then up the Main Ridge track.

We have had other blogs about Black hill (aka "Lizard mecca", particularly in the warmer months and near the rock peaks). You can see them here: Black Hill, Black Hill - wildflowers and lizards.

Other web sites: Black hill on Parks web; Postcards; Wikipedia.

How to get there

Black Hill is about 20 minutes East of the Adelaide city centre. The attached route maps show the way, and each of the walks.

What happened

We had the pleasure of Max's company for the CSIRO walk. It was quite warm but as we were on the Southern side of the hill and we took off about 10am, we had some shade to keep us cool (not good for lizards however). The first lizard spotted was indeed a Cunningham skink - but it was dead, but at least the group got to check out the size, shape and colour for future reference. Full points to the girl in our group who spotted it - it was well camouflaged in the rock. Peter our guide was going to perform an autopsy to find out what happened. It was a slow and steady climb with plenty of breaks for little legs (and bigger ones) to recover. We worked our way up to the home of a skink family (see photograph) but when we were there, no one was home - and no scats. Out looking for food perhaps?

The second walk was short and hard. We weren't planning to go to Black Hill that week, but a traffic jam caused us to abort our plans to travel further afoot, and settle on Amber's gully. Although we do go to the same parks regularly - it is different every time with new things to spot. There were clouds of butterflies on this walk hovering around the wild flowers and huge numbers of very noisy cicadas (you can find out more about cicadas here). They generated a deafening noise, much like a Mexican wave, undulating through the bush (a short video attached captures some of the noise). There was this cute little red and black beetle (see photograph) - we saw several of them just walking on the bush track. And of course there were lizards.

The last few pictures follow the lizard theme - but were taken when I was visiting Brisbane last month and walking through the Botanical gardens and came across a dozen or so Water dragons in and around the lily pond. They were huge!

Dan says

We hoped you enjoyed this blog - feel free to send us a comment (feedback, questions, names of critters, advice, corrections - are all welcome) we just love to hear from you :-)

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