Hi @Bec2902, thank you for your record. Did you mean to upload a photo?
If not, please can you help me to confirm your claim by reassuring me that it was not a water dragon, the only other 1m long lizard in that area, and a species which has previously been misidentified as a goanna. (I am disregarding Lace Monitor because the last record of one in Namadgi was about 8 years ago).
Hi Don, unfortunately I didn’t have a camera on me but another person on the trail got a photo. I can 100% confirm it was not a water dragon, it was a Rosenburgs Goanna. I basically had to walk up the side of a cliff to avoid it because it refused to move from its spot on the trail!
Thanks Bec2902. I will confirm. BTW, individual goannas can be told apart by their colour patterns. I have a dossier of face photos of more than 120 on a research site, for example, and some property owners do the same. For example Matt Higgins has thus recognised 14 individual Lace Monitors on his block, over the years, of which 7 are seen year after year. (Goannas live for decades). So if you can get photos of their left and right faces, we can potentially identify 'source' sites where the same goannas are resident long term , like Naas Valley, and 'sink' sites where goannas don't last, which is what the Gudgenby area appears to be at this stage. The difference is likely due to predation.
Thanks Don, that is very interesting. I’ll have to post on the various Canberra nature photography groups to try find the person who took the photos. This animal was almost completely unafraid of me and my daughter and was still there when we walked back to the car. I wondered if it was familiar with humans.
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