I first heard about Earless Dragons (Tympanocryptis spp.) in 2017, when Nikolas, Raja and I saw the Gibber edition in SA. This little dude was perching on a pebble by the side of the road in the flat gibber plain in the middle of the day. Madness! I don’t have a picture of that fellow but here is one from J’s friend from university, Loren Appleby, that is relying on its amazing camouflage to hide.
The next hidden ears I would see were those belonging to the Monaro Earless Dragon, Tympanocryptis osbornei, which I saw after a stint working down in the Snowy Mountains thanks to my good friend George “Mad Dog” Madani. George, who is a deadset legend, has been working on this species for many years and is now trying to raise public awareness of their plight. Check out the Grassland Earless Dragon Alliance on Instagram and Facebook if you are on those platforms, and “like” or “share” their posts or whatever the social butterflies enjoy.
Without burying the lead any further… in the last week I have seen two juveniles of my third Tympanocryptis species, the mighty Tympanocryptis condaminensis. This one is the closest to home for me and also the one that I have put the most effort in for. I first heard about the Condamine Earless Dragon in 2018 when I was helping to plan some surveys for the beast around the Gowrie Junction area just west of Ipswich. I discovered that legendary Toowoomba naturalist Rod Hobson had been instrumental in the early work on the species and so I rang him up for a chat about them. Despite extensive surveys following Rod’s recommendations, we never found the Dragon in that area… but the seed had been planted and I knew I must see the Dragon one day.
Over the years, I gradually built up my knowledge of these elusive little monsters through chance conversations with other field hounds and through the general osmosis of working as an ecologist in SEQ. This all came to a head at the end of last year when I bumped into a researcher from USQ (Dr JP Emery) who is currently working on the species. We had a good chat and the fire to see CED was rekindled… unfortunately, on my first attempt the entire region was flooded! I had another crack last weekend with J, dipping, but again bumping into a Dragon researcher out in the paddock. Callum was working with JP and actually had a captive juvenile in the car. Needless to say, J was stoked! We had a good look at the little guy and I got all the useful tips I could from Callum before heading home.
I’d seen the Dragon now, but I hadn’t found one myself. I wanted to rectify that, but I was running out of time… summer was on its last legs. After we got home, two days of rain and generally miserable weather preceded one last hot and sunny day before the forecast worsened again – perhaps meaning I’d have to wait until next spring to get back out there. My mind was occupied by the peculiarities of my behaviour… but when that sunny day came it was back into the red rocket for another long drive to the west. Sweetening the deal were a couple of rare plants I’d glimpsed with J, plus some interesting leps in the general area.
The first stop was by the roadside to check on a suspected Callitris baileyi… it looked good pretty quickly and after examining a nearby hyperparasite I moved on to Irongate Conservation Reserve to get a better look at Homopholis belsoni. Again, it looked good… nice. I was 2 from 3 so far (although my Callitris has since been called into question on iNat – great pain). Irongate is an amazing place, well worth a repeat visit with a bit more time. As always when in remnant habitats it’s hard not to imagine what the country would have looked like prior to human settlement… in this case, the contrast was even starker than usual given the surrounding agrarian hellscape with sorghum stretching to the horizon surrounding the roughly 30 ha of the reserve.
The Condamine Earless Dragon is now listed as Endangered under state and federal legislation and moving through the landscape in which they (theoretically) occur it’s easy to see why. From Mt Tyson west to Cecil Plains (some 30km or so) every possible area has been converted into cropland. The following description of their habitat is taken from the species’ conservation advice: “The Condamine Earless Dragon occurs in an area on black-cracking clays that is intensively cropped … almost all records of the species have been made on one private property, along narrow road reserves or in headlands (thin, less than 10 m wide strips of grassland on paddock verges”. Basically, the species habitat has been ransacked.
Arriving to my chosen search area I put the red rocket into low range and slowly cruised in first gear… for three hours! Finally, after many false alarms involving large crickets or spiders running away from the car, I got one. The little beauty looked up at me as I carefully and slowly exited the car, shaking like a leaf from adrenaline. I managed to get a couple of crappy insurance photos with my phone, and then some better ones with my big camera, before xe had had enough of my creeping around and made xir escape down a soil crack. I had finally been able to find my own CED in the wild! An animal that very few people have ever seen (at least knowingly). It felt very special.
After extracting the soul of a careless Stubble Quail, by the roadside, I couldn’t stop smiling as I drove north to Doctors Creek Reserve to look for some leps, although my grin slackened somewhat when I had to make a roughly 15km detour to avoid 150m of roadworks. All’s fair in love and war I guess… I ended up getting home well after dark after a satisfying day out in the Darling Downs.
Postscript: when setting up my subscriber page at the time of my last post, I noticed that I had confused the modern Greek word “σπίτι” (pronounced spiti and meaning house) for the much more apropos Ancient Greek “οἶκος” (pronounced oikos, and also meaning house). This error has now been rectified! If you want to receive an email when I put up a new post then go to that page to register 🙂 see ya next time 🙂