Reptile Fight Club - Australia Trip w/ Paul & Dougal of Brother Nature.

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

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All right, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. My name's Justin Jewelander, and with me here, as always, is Rob Stone. How's it going? It's going great. I'm excited for this. It's super fun. I've been waiting to hear from Paul. I get to talk to Dougal, meet him.

That'll be great. Yeah, yeah, this is fun stuff. So, as Rob alluded to, we have a couple of guests tonight. Paul Duren, we've had him on before and welcome him back. He's been feeding us some photos from his latest trip to Australia, so we've been chomping at the bit to hear a little bit more about this, so we're glad to have him on. And his Aussie guide over there, Dougal, your last name, I'm sorry.

Sorry, it's Gilman. People may know me socially online from my content as Brother Natch Oz. yeah yeah that's that's what i knew yes i'm like who's this google i thought his name was brother nature come on well welcome to the podcast uh let's let's hear a little bit about you kind of what got you into herptoculture and kind of where you fit and that kind of thing all right so my background as a naturalist started from a young age um i was very fortunate to be raised in a very beautiful tropical island setting in the Sunday islands on the Queensland coast just north of nearby we have you know all the 74 islands to be precise so it's a tropical wonderland

kind of like the Bahamas over there you know lots of diving and sailing and beautiful tropical islands and veils and bikinis all that sort of stuff early beach my hometown's a very backpacker you know relevant hot spot for travelers to come and see and travel the islands and dive the reef and stuff like that. So, of course, my childhood was just embedded in wildlife and diving and snorkeling, fishing, you know, and from a young age, I just, you know, every frog and lizard or snake birds.

My mum's a big birder. She does a lot of conservation as well, so she's a big influence in my life. But, you know, I was raised under the wing, like many of us probably out there, you know, raised on David Attenborough documentaries and things like that and that geo stuff. So developed a love of the natural kingdom from a very young age

and just live and breathe it to this day. I work primarily as a carpenter as a builder, but use all my spare time to gallivant around the country looking for wildlife. I recently halfway through 25 started working as a wildlife field guide as well. Okay, nice. And that's how I now know, Paul, is he came and joined me, approached me from my social media and said, hey, would you be interested? You know, he became aware that I just started guiding.

So I'm wanting to eventually, obviously, get out on my own and start developing my own wildlife slash herping guiding. So I thought I'd use Paul as a bit of a guinea pig. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, well, it sounds like he enjoyed the experience as well. So I think he was a happy guinea pig. It was the main beach like last. I have a couple friends over there that are snake catchers,

and I know that it's kind of cutthroat. And is it the same with guiding over there? I mean, do you have issues, or is it a difficult process? look being quite new to it um i'm yet to obviously discover all the pros and cons of guiding but yes i've just as a naturalist over the last couple of years particularly as i'm traveling around australia in my caravan with my wife we've now lived on the road for five years so we're just leapfrogging from point of interest the point of interest you know we work a couple of months here we utilize the the hot summers generally to herb and do our cinematography and photography and

and stuff like that. So in my travels, I encounter a lot of other naturalists, but also guides. And you quite often, particularly when you're carrying a long telephiler lens and you're seen with a camera that obviously attracts a lot of conversation and inquiry from people where they'll be like, oh, what have you seen today, anything interesting? And you obviously, you know, have conversations and you converse and exchange what you've seen and what you know. People will quite often say, oh, I'm really interested in seeing that.

Can you point me in the right direction? And you share a lot of the time. And I love the sharing component. I think there needs to be a lot more of it. And generally speaking, here in Australia, most naturalists will be really accommodating and say, hey, yeah, if you're interested in, say, tree kangaroos, go try Peterson Creek in the Atherton Tablelands or whatever it be. But yes, you certainly encounter, and I've had some negative encounters with guides. or thankfully majority positive ones,

but, you know, I had a instance where we were living up in Lockhart River, up in the Cape, where we obviously get the Great Pipins and things, and that was a childhood wish list. But whilst we were there, we were very interested in the Palm Cockatoo's as well. So I was doing a lot of cinematography of Palm Cockatoo's,

and spending a lot of and devoting a lot of time, the two of us, my wife and I, to finding nesting sites and setting up hides and, you know, filming all the interesting cool behavior that they do. And I had met a particular guide at a prior location. I won't go into details because for obvious reasons. But, you know, I thought we were quite good friends and we shared and conversed and they would, you know, comment on my social media and vice versa,

and we became reasonably friendly. And, well, we happened to bump into this particular guide up in the Cape. I felt secure in saying that, you know, we had established a good relationship and therefore I would be safe in sharing a particular nest hollow site for these palm cockatoos. And I had actually said to him, hey, look, you know, these are sensitive birds. You know, you have that question very carefully. And he knew all this anyway because he'd been working up in the cave for a number of years anyway. And anyway, the next time we visited this palm cocktoe nesting site,

all the grass was trampled, trees had had branches broken off, they had got far too close and subsequently these two rather, they were a young pair, so they were only just sort of starting the whole meeting of pairing up and, you know, doing the nesting hollow thing, they weren't a mature pair, so they were in their infancy, learning the ropes, so same. Well, they aborted from this site, obviously it had been interfered with and they felt their privacy had been breached and we no longer saw them there and that was just really disappointing and and that you know that gets you a bit jaded sometimes and um you try and not overthink it and think okay i'm not going to allow that one person to you know change me or

whatever yeah yeah and stop me from sharing with most other naturalists but it also makes you go okay, maybe I'll be a little bit more skeptical or want to get to know these people. And, you know, I'm open to Facebook spying, Instagram spying someone and finding out, you know, the motor mopperende before sharing in-depth information on that. Right. Yeah. Rob and I were at a spot that's pretty well known for, you know, a certain type of rattlesnake and we were herping and had a couple friends as well there and and all of a sudden this big van drives up or actually it was in front of us so and we'd been there earlier but we were going to go back at night and and they you know about 15 people pile out and and so we'd gone to a spot where we'd found a rattlesnake under a board you know or a piece of wood and so we went back and it was still there under the wood and so we were just kind of

watching it and taking pictures and they just kind of did a little sweep of the area and then got back in their van and left, didn't even talk to us or acknowledge us really and didn't see the rattlesnake that we had right there, you know, so it was kind of a strange encounter. But yeah, it's, it's kind of an interesting thing, like, especially in regards to that, you know, if they're guiding people to this spot to look at palm cockatoos, but at the same time, they don't understand that their actions or have those kind of consequences or they don't care, you know, which it sounds like that might have been the case. That's really frustrating to see, you know, It's a fine line, I think.

There's like an etiquette out here. It's an unspoken etiquette, and that is if we're there on the side of the road, whatever it is, photographing it, and they're interested and they can see you, and obviously you've caught their attention, I'm all for someone saying to me, hey, really interested in doing that. When you're done, would you mind if I would have to do the same, I'd go, you're more than welcome to come and share it with me right now, or just give me two minutes, I'm almost done and go for it. then there's also, and a little bit related to maybe what happened with your episode with all those people coming out of the van, maybe there was just one member there that went, oh, okay, they're obviously busy doing that. Let's give them their room. We'll come back later, whatever it be.

You can get that side where people are really, really courteous, maybe hypercourteous and don't want to intervene or they're just shy or, you know, reluctant to turn around and say, hi, hey, you've caught our attention. can we share and you know that comes in all different manners and modes but um then you just get some people and i'm a big diver i do a lot of scuba diving and this is something probably i see more in that genre of diving as you'll be filming and photographing a subject but because obviously there's that component of we're all on air we've got a short window to get it done right people are far rude or underwater so all of a sudden you'll get another diver just come careering in with

camera and because you can't really communicate and say hey can i join you obviously you know pro divers can by a little bit of sign language and just general communication but um you know some people just completely disregard all etiquette and just come flying in boof buff buff buff and you might be doing cinematography where you don't want flash go right you're like hey come on you're looking at him like are you serious right yeah yeah it's a double-edged sword yeah that's for sure Yeah, it is tricky, especially where there's some places where there are very few, you know, spots where you can see certain species or, you know, or, so that's, that adds an additional challenge too. Do you find that you're finding your own spots where, you know, people may not be or where, you know, you don't have to compete with that kind of thing or is that? Yeah, I absolutely 100% put emphasis on that. I don't use our natural as the great deal. I know a lot of herpers that just buy Nat, Instagram, everything just goes to the places

where everyone else saw it. I'm the complete opposite. I really love to find my own spots. I love the peace and quiet. I love knowing that, hey, I've got a new spot. You know what I call? If I get desperate, though, and I've spent, you know, hundreds of hours, hundreds of dollars on diesel and fuel and you're somewhere remote, yeah, you do go, okay, right, yeah, maybe I need

to bite the bullet. or am I doing something wrong? Have I got the timing right? You know, there's all those variables that make you sort of start to scratch your head. And you're like, okay, oh, damn, and I might have to resort to the spot. Yeah, right. Generally speaking, I like to try and do my own thing. Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, like, you know, some places, especially national parks, only have certain. That was one thing that kind of struck me in Australia is the lack of trails. Like, you know, in America, if we have. of National Park, there's hundreds of trails, you know, all over the place. But in Australia, like, for example, you know, Uluru, there's, what, three, maybe four trails in the whole area, you know, one that goes around the rock, one that goes into the, you know, Cat of Judah. And that's about it. Like, everywhere else is like you're breaking ground or you're going to get in trouble because you're off trail, you know. Or the trail is 10 minutes long, you know.

Yeah, yeah, it's a very short trail. Yeah. It's become a really prevalent issue in the last sort of decade. A lot of our national parks used to have more trails, more accessibility, but land rights and all sorts of things are coming into place. Muggling has everyone on the back foot. So day by day we're getting reduced access to more and more parks and, you know, natural places.

We're being locked out and there's boom gates and security. And, you know, 20 years ago, none of that existed. You'd just go out of walk wherever you wanted. The Rangers would never give you any grief. They might pull over and just say, hey, you're okay. You know, you go, yeah, we're just, you know, natural. They're like, oh, okay, cool. Oh, nice to see you.

Have fun. Bye. These days, you're screwed. I'm looking at you sideways. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you get from the fifth degree, you know, from these wannabe police officers. But, yeah, it's a really prevalent problem that we're getting locked out of

more and more places and yeah funding is another issue you know changes in government obviously have really you know drastically reduced funding the parks get so tracks are being closed because they can no longer maintain them

here in Australia it's obviously always prevalent the risk of fire obviously in particularly we're talking the top end of Queensland and the Northern Territory here the seasonal temperatures get up into easily deadly areas so they'll close certain areas from after 9-10 no longer commence

that walk and there's all sorts of oh and h issues and they're becoming more and more prevalent to like oh occupational health and safety I'll update everyone here in Australia obviously public liability and you know people suing parks for you know not having responsibility for themselves. That's so bizarre. Yeah. I'm going to blame you because I didn't bring enough water on this hike. And I, that was a shocking thing to me because I, after we herped in the NT with Rob and the group, I went over to W.A. by myself, over to Kondonara area. And I was going to go check out, you know, bungal bungles, but it was closed. I'm like, wait, it closes. I didn't, you know, that's just so, spoke foreign. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, and there were some other areas that I wanted to hit that were, you know, gated and you couldn't access them. So, you know, what do you do? You just go where you can. Yeah. That's a classic case of the actions of the minority, spoiling for the minority, just because one dickhead went in there in a tiny little sedan got dead and then had a three-day walk out and died from dehydration or whatever. Now, no one can go in there because no one's responsible enough. yeah um and it is strangely getting locked out of places like you know just recently they closed jim jim falls out in can do again prematurely yeah um the first hint of rain and oh my god we're scared someone's going to get bogged and bang gates closed yeah and they'd been late to open it this season because we had a late um bit to the monsoon the roads got gouged out again so the road contractors were due to go in there in the March to have the park reopened by April. Subsequently, they were postponed. They went on to work on different contracts and road gratings,

which meant that they didn't get back there until June, July. By the time they had done the work, it was August. So there was a very short window this year. Jim Jim was open for a couple of weeks. You know, that's more and more prevalent across the top end. And across the country, we're just seeing, because a lot of the work is now also being outsourced to contractors where parks and wildlife used to have wardens that were capable of driving a grader

or a bulldozer and they would just leave a grader parked halfway out along that road near one of the river crossings that was prone to being washed out on occasion and if it did they'd just take you know drive out there fire up the grater, screed that bit of road, prepare it open that doesn't happen these days you know They hire these guys with too many degrees that have no practical skills whatsoever. Subsequently, the actual hard work doesn't get done in these parks.

They outsource it to civil road contractors who have other obligations, charge like wounded bulls, and subsequently their budget gets eaten into even further, and they have less and less money each time. It's a perpetual snowballing beast. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's, it sounds like a lot of fun in some way. You're going to, you got some challenges in front of you. But let's talk about the fun stuff. Let's get into the herping and your trip.

I agree. Unless you have any other questions, Rob, in that regard. No, I think that's great. Okay. Bring Paul into the show too. Yeah. Maybe this becomes the context where Paul, so I know you had talked to us on the front end of the goal. How did you come to presumably it was.

social media stuff, but how did you find Google? How did that all come about? Where is the ideation for the whole thing? Right, right. So, basic, so I keep scrub pythons, and I had decided I was going to go to Australia and go with my son, who's 23. He's also very into the, into all the snakes as well. And somewhat in, it wasn't a graduation gift per se, but you know, a celebration

of graduating university and all that stuff as well. And so I started trying to figure out like, okay, well, the only actual herping I've ever done before is snake road.

And I've done tons and tons of pike I'm super comfortable being outside and camping and, you know, all of that kind of stuff and always looking for whatever animals are wherever I am. But in terms of thinking about how to structure a trip, talk to you guys, talk to a few other folks who've been to Australia. And I was just basically looking on YouTube to try and find, I just search for, I think, scrub pythons iron range and um and found dougal's channel and uh and i was like oh man this guy's awesome and watched so watched a whole bunch of his videos and i was like okay i really vibe with his approach and um he's very respectful of the animals and he's not just looking to

you know it's clear that he wasn't just looking to tick off entries on the life list that really had a deep understanding of all of the environments that he was herping in and traveling in. So I just reached out to him and said, hey, I'm planning to come to Australia with a few other people at this point. By that point, I talked to a couple of friends. Would you be open to meeting up and showing us around? and we're going to be there for a month. But, you know, basically we'll take whatever we can get. And I was thinking, you know, I'll be super lucky if I can get a day with this guy.

Right. And we talked, we went back and forth a little bit in messages and had a couple of phone calls. And before I knew it, we had planned out that we wound up being together for three and a half weeks, basically. Wow. It got me at good timing. Yeah. But seriously, like one of the best experiences of my life, I would say, in a lot of ways. It's just like I feel incredibly lucky.

And I know Claude and our friend Yuki, who is there as well, all three of us came away from it. Just all three of us being total news to doing this. and then hanging out with with somebody who was one just like super fun to hang out with and everybody got along just on a personal level but also was a fantastic teacher and at the end of the trip we had marionella his wife dougal's wife was with us as well and that was that was fantastic as well we were going to we had time planned at the very end of the very end of the trip for at sydney that was just going to be me and claude and basically i just kept like shrieking that down it was going to be a week and i think by the time we were down there wound up being three days and that was four days too many um actually because if i'd spend one more day helping with these guys would have found pretty in broadland right that was good his way yeah a little spoiler alert for the end of the trip there was a that was a complete

that rambling answer to a super simple question. No, no, that's great. Yeah, that's really cool. You were able to make that work and kind of time it right, just to, that's a good introduction. It seems like you guys killed it. So what areas did you hit on your trip? We started off, we met up in Cams, spent a couple of days in Cairns. Then we flew up to Lockhart.

Oh, so you flew up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, nice. Yeah. recent episode. So yeah, and that actually, I've been planning to drive and do it was like, no, don't do that. Well, let's talk into that a little bit. Yeah, yeah. I'm curious. I think we had talked about this a little bit in a recent episode. So what, why is that just the convenience and because you're already there, Google, is that sort of that situation or what's the practicalities involved with that? Well, primarily for us, it was time constraint. I didn't want to.

dissolve, you know, to, you know, potentially even more days just getting from cans. It's 700 kilometres up to Lockhart, I believe, in memory. But that piece of road, the PDR, is a corrugated nightmare, sinkholes, all sorts of stuff. It's a vehicle killer. But it's also very timely, you know, there's areas where you may only be doing sort of 30, 40 kilometers an hour. um so it's a big drive you know if you get it done in 11 hours you did well so you lose a day in rather sort of i wouldn't call them dead zones but voids i guess so areas not much appeal yes we would have found stuff on the way but we would have lost a massive component of the time

needed to actually find green pythons in what is still the dry season so uh we we were there for late October, early November. And it had been a slow start to the wet season. And I'd been keeping an eye on the weather and there hadn't been any rain. So I knew things would be slow. We'd converse back and forth in our discussions and said, look, I think, you know, I feel and I would recommend that we just prioritise. Once we get a scrubby in cans, we just go straight to the Cape.

We fly up. We rent a vehicle. and we devote as much time to getting a green python because at this time of the year it still will be challenging because until we get decent solid rain up in the Cape, everything is just, you know, dormant, not really moving, just fighting to survive up in the canopy, very little movement.

The moment it rains, however, and you start to get the first of the monsoon rains, the explosion of life is phenomenal. And it's hard to convey this message to people. I've had it with other naturalists where I'd be like, okay, if you're keen to see green pythons, don't even contemplate really the dry season. You're going to put in so much hard work. You can go from seeing two or three specimens a week in the dry season,

right through the late dry season, like so late October, early November, you know, this can be the case. But, you know, as soon as Christmas comes around, you've got NEOs hatching out, generally around the 3rd of December, just before Christmas. You've by that stage generally had lots of monsoon storms and the creeks are coming up. You know, the vegetation's all greened up. Everything's nice and damp and wet and humid, and the snakes come alive. You know, Mariella and I, well, we lived there for 14 months. So I got to see the full spectrum of the full season.

And so it was fantastic. We had a great time. But in the summertime, you can go to having 80 specimens a night. You know, get a dozen neos and, you know, all the rest, Green Python. They're everywhere. People don't quite understand how thick on the ground they actually are until you go there peak wet season. Wow. That's incredible.

We were hurting hard. I mean, we were getting it really hard. We were basically like 18 hours a day, something like that. And we're there for four nights. We saved this place called Greenhouse, which I would definitely recommend. Where was that located? That's in Lockhart. Okay.

So it's like greenhouse except instead of a U, it's got a double O. Yeah. And it's a bunch of converted shipping containers. Okay. And they prepare meals for you and stuff. And that was fantastic. Nice. And you can rent a car there in lock cards.

That was a question. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm curious about the, you know, the flights and the car rental. How difficult is that? How expensive? Yeah. A day or? I think there's two flights a day, as I recall, from booking it.

You can either get a direct flight or we got a connecting flight. or it was a we didn't have to get off the plane but we touched down briefly in another community on the way up there and then the car was a little bit expensive but it was a

you know it was a solid vehicle and you know legit four wheel drive what you wanted kind of kind of vehicle and it if we brushed up against some bushes nobody was going to notice it

but it could put it that way but But they, it was just, there was a, I think, just basically a guy there who lives in Lockhart, who has a couple of these things. And I just emailed them ahead of time. And they had it waiting for us at the airport. And when we left, we just left the keys in it and got on the plane and flew back. It was, I would definitely do it that way again.

I might add, though, that, you know, communication with them is, It's not a speedy process. No, no. You'd want to do it in advance. And, you know, because the internet connections up there are obviously a different kettle of fish to what we use. So, you know, it's very casual. You know, if you get a response in a week, you've done quite well. Yeah.

Definitely book in advance. But on the other note, yes, they're dearer. But when you actually calculate the rental costs of, say, a full-wheel drive. in Cairns where technically you're not meant to drive up the PDR with that anyway and if they have a tracker on their vehicle and see that you've driven up the PDR, they'll hit you with all sorts of additional costs. Then also the price of diesel on the way up, the cost of the accommodation that you're probably going to want to stay halfway unless you have a really traumatic trip and do it all in one. By the time you do the flight up and the slightly more inflated price of renting a

vehicle in Lockhart, you're kind of neutral anyway. Okay, good stuff. Carry on. Yeah. Sorry, Paul, we'll draw back to you. No, no. I mean, so, yeah, I was to say we were there for four nights and a half day on either side of that and going super hard. And we found three green trees during that time. one of which we didn't even find one of which was another naturalist who was there another guide

who was there to the earlier point of cooperation between guides and and you know he showed he showed us that one blue and we found the other two

found lots of other amazing amazing stuff but that was rugged that was definitely it was a girl like yeah yeah yeah yeah For sure.

For sure. Yeah, at this time of year, once the wet season starts, you know, a month later, it becomes a different kettle of fish. It becomes a lot easier as soon as you've had that rain. You'd be out just getting almost tired of them. You'd be like, oh, look, there's another greenie. Yeah. So is the flight and the rental and everything accessible when you're in the wet season? Yes, but you'd want to leave yourself a travel window.

in the wet season, those flights do get cancelled at the drop of a hat. Spontaneously, you could be waiting at the airport about to board your flight. They say, oh, the flight's just been cancelled because they're smaller aircraft, generally sort of 40, 50-seaters. And if there's a big monsoonal trough coming through, they just can't can the flight. And you might not get rescheduled onto a flight for another two or three days potentially. So, you know, if you were to do the flight and rental option to the Cape, you want to, and this is something I brought up with Paul. When we first initially booked was we want a little window either side for courtesy.

Yeah, yeah. Like when we got back to Cairns, we made sure that we had like a day and a half. So that if we got bumped the day, it wouldn't be a problem. Right. Subsequent flight. Okay. Right. So have a few days in Cairns before and after you're planning to head up there just to make sure you don't. Yeah, that makes sense. In Kansas, fun anyway, so. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it didn't suck. Yeah. And the plane, the plane never, it was never more than like a wonderful, something like that. So I think if they had, if they had to cancel something, at least at the time of the year that we were there, there was plenty of capacity, like if they had to double up the next day.

Yeah. they would have had that bandwidth for sure very cool and iron range puts you up in uh the the area for a different kind of scrub too you got the king of other hands and then you got emma well it's not official or anything but emma it's it's a different scrub up there it's a different type yeah but uh so how how was your luck in and finding your scrubs so okay okay i got to tell these stories. So just because, like, I mean, as a new perver,

like it was, like you really couldn't ask for better. So the first scrub, the one in when, when Claude and I were flying in from Seattle and our friend Yuki was flying in from Amsterdam. We both had connections on route.

Google is texting us from Cairns. He's like, guess what I? already found and he had gone to the esplanade you know the waterfront walkway there in cans and found and noticed that there were birds making a bus by by a tree where he had seen a scrub what like a month before or something like that three weeks yeah yeah and went over and checked and looked up in the front of the home and you could just barely see like it was the size square it was the size of there was like a couple of posted stamps worth of scales that you could see between the funds we get off a flight and he takes us there and we were just elated i mean i couldn't even

i can't even tell you how just seeing like this teeny little scrap of a stake and like oh i know what that is i know what that is um and then later that evening it was uh around dusk it just grabbed really like it woke up and it was sort of looking down at us and it's like right next to the kid's play area yeah and people would be running by and they'd be like oh what are you looking at like oh scrub python they're like oh yeah cool nice just keep going um but so it woke up and it was looking down at us we got some cool pictures of it sort of peering down from the from the palm fronds and then it it just as it as it got a little bit darker it just made its way off all of the trees basically the branches touch each other and all of the other trees were just filled with bird nests that had birds sitting on on eggs or on babies and it's like okay the all you can eat buffet is open and so we didn't really get any good pictures of that but it was so I think it was like just so amazing to just look up at the the twilight sky and just see this 10 foot snake

above our head, just winding its way through the branches and disappearing off into the darkness. Like, oh, oh, my God. It's so, so amazing. But then we go up to Lockhart and we could not find one.

You know, we just, and we were looking so hard, we were practically falling asleep at the wheel, road cruising and then, and we'd be like, how in the jungle getting all, super bit up by ants and whatever looking under roots and you know trying to binoculars up into

the palms and the last night you literally decided okay we're done it's not going to happen we're going to drive back to the degree and we come around a corner and what is lying in the road that's awesome yeah i might backtrack because paul's forgotten a few bits as well we did also have another episode in Cairns we went to a drive near the airport that I've found good-sized scrubbies in the past and this is out yeah yeah anyway we'd had a reasonably eventful night got nice species you know 20 frog mouths which is one of our outlet night jars and some other fodder and we were having a generally pretty pretty good night and we were sort of I was feeling a bit despondent I was like oh come on this is my reliable spot

What for the scrubbies, you know, there's one here somewhere. Well, same story. We're about to leave. We're about to give up. And I thought, oh, I'll just poke my head up there because I'd gone down and dry creek bed. Yeah. I'll have a look up there.

Lime behold, beautiful big scrubby had just come out of the rock work and we just lay on the forest floor. Oh, man. At that stage, young Claude wasn't with us. He was having, you know, a bit of time zone difference. difficulties and had remained back accommodation, but Paul and Yuki and I had gone out for a Mish

devotedly. And the other two were still a little bit further up the hill from me. So I saw this thing on the forest floor. I was like, oh, finally really delivered. These guys are going to love this thing. And I mistakenly

sort of screamed out to the boys. Oh, hey, come. I've found one. Anyway, in doing so, this python's got a bit of a fright and started to retract back into this video work. So I'm like, oh, sugar. So I've grabbed this thing and it's putting up quite a bit of resistance

and it's using all its strength to retract itself back into this. It was like a four meter of scrub, right? Yeah. Yeah. This rock retain a wall to retain this earthen bank. Great. And so I'm screaming for them to come

and assist me in peeling this python out. And anyway, I managed to get out before they arrived anyway. So we had this beautiful, big cracking specimen. And anyway, it was at that point, I was like, damn it, Claude's back at the hotel. You know, he can't miss this. This is also. So I left Paul and Claude in the dark in the forest with this filthy part.

They were absorbing this thing and having a moment. I was like, we're only five minutes down the road to the hotel. So I jogged back to the car, went and collected. Claude, bought him back to the fight. So all four of us could sit in the forest and appreciate this thing. And, of course, the cameras are out and we're shooting and everything like this. Paul's being a complete hog. He's had this thing in a quiet.

Anyway, Yuki, I'm a friend from Ants the Dam's like, okay, it's my go. Hand is over. And in the process, this really placid, mundane snake, who had just been chilling out for the last half hour, I just went from zero to hero and decided to, you know, pretend to be one of those ankle bracelets that they put on criminals. And attached itself to Paul's ankle. And I'll tell you what, it's only something Herbers can understand, but that that initial squeal of a large life

getting its face into your leg. Oh, no. And I was filming all this. Well, supposedly, I had actually failed to, you know, press the record. Oh, no. And we missed the moment. Yeah. There was a lot of talk, actually.

It was Yuki's suggestion that, you know, Paul's initiation by fire to Australia being bitten by this four metre scrubby that we should quickly take them back into town and and sit in his fight full of ink. So he's got a fight matter. I thought that was quite a good. clever idea we then left cans the next day before going up to the cape and uh you know as soon as i arrived there and saw how dry it was i was like oh this is going to be hard work i'm going to have to throw these boys in the deep end there's no rest for the wicked and so we did we did the massive

grind and we got quite a good bit of fodder in the meantime but we had to work hard for it at that time of the year we yeah yeah yeah we did a trip up there um around the same time, late October, and, yeah, it is a lot less, a lot less activity, although we did see some good stuff, you know, but yeah, we did happen upon a couple greens, but we missed out on scrubs. We stopped frills and spotted pythons and other good stuff, saw some of the palm cockatoos flying overhead and stuff. Yeah, what was, I guess, Paul, what was your favorite find out there?

aside from the scrubs. Yeah, aside from the scrubs, oh man, boy, that's a tough one. I would say a high point of the trip rather than a specific species was we spent a night, there was a super low tide while we were there

at like two in the morning. And so we went out, I think we probably got to this area around maybe 11 p.m. Yeah. And it's a, it's interesting. There's not much of a beach, but there's a coral shell, a shallow coral, or cresting reef. Okay.

Yeah, there you go. That is only, I guess it's only exposed to, is it only during really low tides? Yeah, that's right. So I'll bring everyone up to speed. Cresting reef is the very top of the reef where storms and low tides and sun, hedge the coral and we get these large long vast areas that you can walk around and broken coral rubble there's some sponges and sea grasses and you know small small stout stocky corals that you know survive in this zone it's kind of like the weeds in your pavers you know they cop a hard

life yeah so you're in this zone flipping flipping rocks looking for all sorts of invertebrates and fish and creepy crawlies in the night there's a wealth of really interesting stuff there if you're into your it's a haven for it so I'll let Paul take it back from there. So yeah I mean it was that was amazing

to be just sort of wandering around on this I don't know it's 30 acres maybe it's a pretty good sized area and and we were being mindful of frocks.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what running through my mind was like, okay. Yes. So we were being mindful of

crocs. And we were eye shining them because they were hanging out at the, at the, there was a couple of spots

where as the water is draining off this big, this big shelf area, there's a couple of spots where the water just sort of it forms.

It's fun. It got it. Yeah, yeah. And And the crotch just basically hang out their mouth open. And so every once in a while, you're just like, smack. As they grabs something, which you can totally see where they were. It was very clear.

And one of the smaller ones, we went out like, oh, okay, let's see how close it will let us get. And it was maybe, I don't know, that one was maybe six-ish, maybe something feet long. And, you know, we would sort of walk over towards that side of the shell. and then it would go a little bit further out in deeper water, and then we left it would come back in. And we're seeing, like, all these super cool octopuses, and these, like, amazing sea stars, and all of these just wild invertebrates and everything,

and everybody's totally exhausted, but nobody wants to leave because we're just, you know, experiencing this incredible, probably once in a lifetime sort of experience. And, you know, that's, yeah, so that, that was, that was, that was just super fun. Yeah, there wasn't a particular, particular one, one species or even one experience, but that experience was pretty cool. Well, we also did end up getting it within about three meters of that crook as well.

Yeah. Yeah. That was cool. You got a good, up-close view of that, bad boy. nice yeah that's a i remember uh going through some of those river crossings on the way up there and see you got all the crock signs and i about stalled out in the middle of the river and yeah that was not a fun thing but uh pretty fun and then on the way back we stopped at the river and took a little swim and stuff and you know the water was pretty clear but

and i think that's the way we should delve back into as if you are considering during the drive from Cairns to Lockhart is you do have a number of river creek crossings that if you had an early start to the wet season, you could easily find that in the day's drive having left Cairns to get up to the Pasco or Wenlock rivers, even the Archer River, although they've made a lovely new bridge over the Archer River, which is above the high water line. So that now excludes the Archer River as a potential close off play. But it still leaves the Pascoe and Wenlock.

You know, you could arrive there to flash flooding and not be able to get into Lockhart at all. So it's a roller of the dice when you arrive to Australia. You need to be very prevalent and keeping an eye on the weather apps to find whether they've had water and whether the Winnlock and Pascoes have come up. And then, of course, if you do drive in, you have your little herping trip there to find that it rained whilst you were there and those rivers have come up and you're forced to fly out anyway. So now you're lumped with the potential of a Cairns rental car stuck in Lockhart. Yeah, not great.

Yeah. Cool. So were you able to find a green python? We did. We had a hard slog, big grinds, like lots of road patrolling, scanning all the vegetation on the side. I knew that eventually we'd find greens. I knew that we had enough time there to get the job done. but of course it's still, still hard

because things are super dormant. We ended up finding an additional two green pythons. Thankfully, Yuki, our companion, was very elated. We went into a dry riverbed one night. The target was actually primarily this bit of habitat I knew to have good scrubbies.

So we were doing the riparian margin along this rather broad sandy creek. Double-edged sword. You know, I've caught saltwater crocodiles there before and lots of treats. So there were many a reason to go to this particular site, McLeh's water snakes, all sorts of stuff. But anyway, you know, Claude and I had gone down the creek and Paul and Yuki had gone up the creek. And, you know, we had some little two-way UHF radio so as we could remain in contact with the groups.

And, well, it wasn't needed. The boys hadn't got too far out of the creek before. Yuki was screaming and squealing in the forest and shouting out for us to join them. And we'd had a light sprinkler rain that evening. So we arrived to find, you know, Yuki had found this beautiful green python, which had made its way down out the canopy to obviously predate on just a broken branch, essentially on the edge of the dry riverbed. Right.

Because obviously, you know, their prey is going to come down looking for water in any remaining puddles. and so obviously they're going to concentrate their attention by the water at that time of year. And he found this beautiful specimen all dotted with beautiful little fine droplets of water and it was just stunning. Oh, very cool. You know, you can all attest to the fact that they just glow, they pop. They're just so vibrant, you know, particularly in the dry season, right? Because everything's all dead and dry and brown and dusty and horrible looking.

And then there's this vibrant. right lemon lime green neon sign just there you're just like oh my god how like and this was something i had on the trip up was explaining to these guys that don't worry when you see it you'll know it yeah you know because you get you get what are we looking for you know what am i doing right and what am i doing wrong it's like no you're doing everything right we're in the right place yeah trust me you see it you're gonna know There's no mistake yet. There's no, oh, is that a, oh, could that be a leaf or a stick?

No, it's like, oh, my God, that is a green one. Yeah. No mistake yet. Yeah. Well, one other question on the Iron Range and green pythons is it seems like the middle of winter seems to be a decent time to go up and find greens as well. Is there kind of a downside to that? I mean, do you see less of other species in the winter?

it. I guess, like, at this stage, I'm inclined to disagree. Okay, okay. Yeah. Because when you've been there in the wet season in the summer where you're getting, you know, my P.B, when I was living up there in the summer, is I had 89 specimens and one night. Yeah. So I guess we're all relative. We were visualizing, I think, end of October with, you know, two or three over four days versus, you know, I know, I know Matt Somerville had a

video from June, right? I think early to mid-June, a couple years back, where I think it was, yeah, a dozen to 18 or something like that over a couple days, something like that. But if you're saying, you know, close on 90 is what a real high point can look like. In one night? Yeah, that's all relative. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So he's his body count at a dozen there in a couple of days in midwinter's a reasonably good count, you know, for that time of the year. um perhaps in the middle of the winter and let's let's get realistic winter is not like your it's the tropics yeah it's not it's not cold you know it's still no t-shirt you know board shorts perfectly balmy weather it's more let's call it the dry season it's dry you know there's no longer rain the leaflet is crisping up everything's dusty and dirty and things just go dormant because life isn't moving because there's not this abundance of water everywhere. So it's

different to what you traditionally call wintering, like we'd experience in the southern states here where things physically go underground. But at that time of the year, that's still a pretty good body count. So

you know, I certainly had nights in the winter and weeks and I sort of stopped moving myself because it, you know, fuel is expensive. So while would you go out in the middle of winter looking for something that you've had so abundantly in the past summer, you know what I mean? And they're slow and docile and not really doing much.

So, you know, like I have lots of footage and cinematography, which I'm yet to get out, but of all the babies actually feeding, I have it in slow-mo, high-speed, all sorts of stuff. So, you know, that was the sort of work I was running around doing in the summertime when I was there. So you don't get that in the way. winter time you know you know if you were to go up in the winter time and find a yellow you hit the jackpot you really lucked up you did well they become super super quiet like if you see a yellow in in the winter you've done well and so you know it's also makes me think to things come in seasonal ebbs and flows you can go there one year and it be a pretty mild winter or a wet

winter and you do get a decent body count but if you get a proper dry season where it wasn't you know it's post a particularly dry wet season where things are super quiet water levels are ultra low you could spend weeks there and not get anything so you know it's all the roll of the dice what the seasons have been doing if if you lucked out and got a bad wet season and when in there in the winter following that, I would say you're going to have a really, really, really hard time. Okay. Cool.

All right. So any other highlights from the tropical north Queensland? The F and Q? I was going to say one of the things that really struck me about the green tree pythons. So I don't work with them. I've seen them in, you know, other people's collections or whatever, but I've never had direct dealing with them before. The first one we found,

Doug was like, oh, I don't really like how it's the direction its head is pointing for photography. And he just reaches out and he, like, puts his finger on his chin and just sort of like a gumbie doll, just sort of like, you know, just sort of moves its head slightly. And the snake just doesn't react at all.

Just like, oh, that's where my head is now. And it just like, let him just completely repositioned this thing. That blew my mind. Yeah. Like, I, I didn't, like, that, that just completely blew my mind. None of the snakes that I work with or any snakes that I've ever encountered in the wild do anything like that at all.

So that, again, just like, I mean, I'm sure that would be a recurring theme of this whole podcast. You're like, things the new herper didn't know that you could, one of them is you can pose a green tree I thought like a like a gumpy doll that is a very rare trait in day alone you couldn't do that

with a carpet python or a scrubby well definitely not to that degree you know a scrubby every now and then might allow you to do a little position but you know it's Russian roulette the moment you touch that thing bang

it's heading for the tree tops again or whatever but green pythons they're just freaks of you know the the wild kingdom you know you can just you know adjust a posture and it'll take it it's just gone into complete okay if i don't overreact this thing's not seen me they they play that whole uncamiflage you don't know i'm here still thing oh you just coincidentally happened to bump into me and now i've moved my head over here and you still don't know about me um so they display a very rare trait in the ability to be able to just make very fine, gentle, soft maneuvers and get, you know,

sometimes you'll find a specimen that's got a bit of scar tissue on one side of its head or something can use and as photographic. So you can go, all right, well, I like the other side of your face. So let's put that on display. So, yeah, you can get a lot of nice shots and they're very accommodating. Green pythons are quite unusual in that regard, though. But yeah, I had a lot of, personal good times as well um like paul touched on earlier we vibed um it was evident to me within a couple of days of just been in cans that this was going to be a good trip we were going to get along yeah it's always a relief you know yeah they're good good people and we can hang out and enjoy each other's company absolutely it makes a world of difference because obviously for me

i was concerned are these guys going to be super conservative and tell me not to touch anything and get bent out of shape if, you know, I want to do some shooting or some cinematography. Come on, let's go. Yeah, yeah, more, more, more, tick, tick, tick, tick. Yeah, yeah. I'm more for going around, you know, I'm doing it myself, I'm going around the country, you know, off species.

Right, right, right. But it's something that Paul and I discussed a lot, and that is you've come all this way to see this species, and you may only get one or two. So sit, soak them up, appreciate them. Don't just, you know, flee the scene in the hope that you might get another one or a different species or something and then completely luck out. Before you know, you sat there in hindsight going, oh my God, how come I didn't, you know, six photos of that thinking that we'd get more.

And now I feel as if we're short or, you know, we spent two minutes with this thing on the side of the road before we left. No, sit, watch it, appreciate the fact that, You know, you could sit there and watch it, and it is so focused on what it's doing that you don't see an inhalation. You don't see an eye blink. This thing sits motionless for day on day just in the hope that some tiny little random melamese or little rodent crosses that same path that it's tracked it back to. It's pretty incredible behavior. Yeah, appreciate it, stoke it up.

Yeah, yeah. It was almost like when we found our first one, there was like no talking, everybody was just like in awe. It was almost like a religious experience where you're just staring at this bright green neon sign and just taking it all in. It was pretty cool. And then when we did talk, it was like whispering. Like, why are we whispering? It's not going to disappear if we talk out loud. but it kind of not like this all ethereal wood nymph or something you know you talk too loud it's gone

I'm sure you guys are the same you have the the first moment you saw one burnt into your memory forever I still vividly remember the first specimen I got yeah and a friend of mine a bird naturalist a beautiful gentleman I've been friend with for years he and his wife were out there camping And coincidentally, we found out that they were there and we caught up. And he was like, oh, there's this green python here. I'm like, oh, my God, that's the whole reason I've come to the Cape. My definition of a lifer is a bit different to most people. Most people call a life just a new species that they've seen for the first time.

For me, a life that means something you've wanted to see your entire life. So since I got my first field guide when I was like four years old, whatever it was, I flick through those pages. I saw that Green Python for the first time in that field guard. I was like, one day, I'm going to the bit of a forest, and I'm finding that thing. You know what I mean? That is a massive priority for me as a life goal,

is I must see the Green Python in the wild. So, you know, I'd been running around the scrub for 40-odd years, you know, 35 years, until the day I finally bloody got up there, and lo and behold, we got this thing the moment I walked into the forest. just like Paul, no doubt, remembers his. I could talk you through every second that led up to that moment. I remember it so vividly, and that's the power and the effect of Green Pathons, I think. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And I mean, a lot of cool species. I had the same experience with the Boyd's Forest Dragon, where I was searching every possible tree, you know, and just had that search image and finally saw the search image come to life, and you're like, oh, there it is. you know yeah that was that's pretty cool there's a lot of fun stuff up there a very noteworthy spaces boy yeah yeah yeah all right well where where was it off to next or sorry rob did you have another question for in no i was just going to say dougal you hit on it a little bit but kind of coming into this guiding space how are you uh are you're vetting kind of your

prospective customers making sure that there's an alignment between kind of the way you like to do things and what folks are hoping to do both in terms of sort of locations planning, the species you're looking for, those sorts of things. That sounds pretty prudent on your part. But, yeah, just if you touch on that a little bit because he spoke to, you know, I forget if it was you or Paul or both, kind of highlighted that there was a lot of kind of front-end communication there, and that's certainly something that even just go on on her trips, you know, not nobody's, you know, paying for services or anything like that, but it does seem like a

potentially awkward spot and sort of that guide-client relationship is making sure that. there's an alignment between those two things. Absolutely. For me, in my actual new tour guiding job where it's primarily birding with some wildlife included spontaneously in there,

obviously I'll be handling a group of, you know, anywhere from typically about a half dozen people of different ilks and, you know, backgrounds and you can never agree with everyone. Thankfully, I like to think I'm a pretty easy guy,

own dude and I can get along with most people. But of course, you know, if you've got a group of half a dozen people, complete strangers from the other side of the world for three weeks, you're going to have tired, short nerve endings where you're not going to agree with something someone's got to say and vice versa. So I would never expect to get, you know, and always have the same fundamental ideologies as everyone on board. So that can be challenging. Learning you know, putting out little teasers, little threads to find out what are their opinions, what are their philosophies, what will I get away with, what won't I, and you have to be very tentative at first and tread lightly until you sort of figure out the group and engage what

you will and why would be able to say and do. But within moments of, you know, we'd only had two small, short Skype sort of conversations over the phone, Paul and I leading up to the meeting one another in Cairns and the other boys as well but you know we Australians love our banter and if I can't take the Mickey and tease and poke and prod and you know have a bit of banter you know this is going to be a long tedious trip but thankfully you know I was able to throw these boys in the deep end introduce them to Australian banter they took a hook line sinker ran with it adopted to it very well you know You know, I had so much thrown back in my face.

It was not funny. Every moment I did something stupid, they made me pay for it. Yeah, we just meshed, you know what I mean? Like, we had the same philosophies. And, you know, I would at first tentatively say, oh, should I climb that tree and catch that? So, like, oh, they're going to tell me like, no, you can't touch it. You might transfer a disease or something like that.

You know, all that shit happened. The ball's like looking sideways at me like, hell yes, go and get it. Yeah, cool, let's go. And it just makes it more fun, more adventurous. And before you know it, you've got that big four meter scrubby in your hands. And you're not just saying it, racing off and up into the canopy, like, yeah, I think we saw it scrubby. Definitely saw it scrubby. That's cool.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the other part of it that you mentioned there, for the most part, this was a group that were connected beforehand when you're doing this birding stuff, is that folks that are kind of singularly coming to you and you're creating this composite of a group? Or is that, is it always kind of the context that people are coming to you in that entity beforehand? No. So Paul and the gang were the first private group who approached me via my social media. The work I'm referring to is me as a contracted wildlife tour guide working for a big premier birding business out of Tasmania, our most southern state,

the island off the coast. And they obviously have their network and their tours and, you know, the way they run their tours and their business. And I'm merely one of their field guides as, you know, a contractor. So I'm very much working under their banner with their philosophies, with their clients, tell. So, of course, I have to put my best foot forward and do everything right by the company, by their policies. And so, and because I'm new to that, it's still a bit of a learning curve. You know, I've had some really, really good groups. I've been very fortunate.

I've had some really lovely folks who have been incredibly enthusiastic, very accommodating to me as a new field guide, because there are awkward moments. where, you know, I'm a sound birder, not an expert birder. You know, I generally start that off as the conversation. I'm a generalist. I know my plants, my animals, my marine stuff, insect spiders, you name it. I can generally help you out 90, 95% of the way through all that sort of stuff. Do I know every tiny little minuscule noise a bird makes?

No, I'm afraid I don't. And even there's some of those species, because, you know, we've 600 birds. it's here in Australia. So to know all those birds and then the plethora of calls they all make is a big task. And I've thrown myself in the deep end and I'm learning all that quite, quite hard and constantly listening to audio files and things like that to get to know them better. But of course there's those awkward moments where you're with clientele and you go, I'm afraid I don't know.

But you try and turn it into a task or a game or something you can enjoy together. and that is that whole Cludeau of let's figure it out together. And that seems to work well. And it can be quite enjoyable at the end of the evening. After a big day's birding, you might sit in front of a laptop where everyone uploads their images that they called of a particular mystery bird and you've got a number of different angles and, you know, someone may have even got a little bit more audio

so you can sit and extrapolate that data and figure out what it was. before you know, I'd. Yeah, we've got another new species and that's nice around the dinner table. So that's how I play that one. But with Paul and the gang, you know, it was very, it was far more casual. So, you know, like I touched on, it was a learning curve for me to sort of figure out how do I, you know, run my future tours and things if I start doing this professional level for myself. So, yeah, Paul and the gang with my guinea pigs, but it definitely helped that they were on the same page as me and that they enjoyed my company and vice versa. That made my job real easy that I didn't have

to pussyfoot around and being my best behaviour. Being Australian, I can have a bit of a, I can be a bit rude. I've got some square words in me. I get excited and I can use some foul language from time to time I was annoyed and things like that, but these guys were very accommodating to me and made my life really easy and very enjoyable trip we had indeed. Yeah, it was great. We really did mesh. Paul wasn't clutching his pearls, huh? No.

You're really on in one of the conversations I told Google, like, dude, I spent my entire career in construction. He's like, oh, okay, cool. We're good, then. Good stuff. All right, so after Cairns area and the top end, we flew to Darwin and came to tackle Cacadoo. And, of course, Owen Pelly Python was our primary target, though being Cacadoo, and thankfully all in the gang were open to general wildlife and seeing the birds and seeing the other beautiful landscapes and everything that he's on offer in Cacadoo.

You know, it was primarily focused, obviously, about getting reptiles, but not exclusively. So that makes your days a lot better, frankly, to keep an open mind and sort of keep things a bit general. I generally try and advise people not to come just targeting one species because you can and will walk away with regrets in hindsight. and you're likely to, you know, line yourself up for a bit of disappointment when you don't find it. I generally like to run with the philosophy of don't look for it and you'll find it. I think that knows what I'm referring to when you exclusively just go hunt one thing, one thing, one thing, and you start to overthink it and, you know, you end up missing out on so much stuff. So we hit Kakadu with a pretty open mind of, yeah, we're going to go look for Owen Pellis.

We're going to spend some time doing that. But let's not, you know, lose any more hair about the matter. Let's soak up all the birds and there's so many other species. You know, we were finding the monitors and, you know, the geckos and the birds. Which monitor species did you see? We got the black-spotted ridge tail. Oh, cool. Sionicus.

We did, unfortunately, luck out on Glebo Palmer. Oh, nice. Kimbo's as well. Oh, cool. Sorry, when I said, we didn't find them. They didn't get it. Oh, you did.

We went to Codz. Yes. Have you seen either of there's there? Yeah. I'm yet to get Kimbo. I sent another American good friend of mine from Instagram who I'd shared

a trick with in the past to my spot for Glebo Palmer and he got one there the moment he walked in. So he was super excited that my Glebo spot yielded that species. And I've been back there since looking for the same Kimbo and not found it. You know what I mean? It's just how it's crumbles.

Okay. Nice. Well, in the U.S. when we say luck out, that means we got lucky and saw it. So excuse my confusion there. I'm like, and luck up and luck out. Okay. So you didn't luck up, but you lucked out. out.

Yeah. We had a funny thing. We saw a spotted tree monitor. Yeah. It was just lined in the road. No, no, it was off to the side. It was basking on a rock. And hopped out of the car to try and do another photo session.

And it just takes off into this pandamus. And so we kind of converge three or four. with some endamos from different sides. There's like, I don't know, 10 feet across, something like that. And as we get closer and closer, I'm standing like right next to this thing. And he just goes, oh, crap.

And he's flushed a wallaby that's sleeping under this thing. And it just comes, this wallaby just goes straight at me. It just, you know, and the wallaby looks and be like, ha! Ed takes off and, um,

we, we didn't get any more. It looks at the monitor, but it really did. You got a close look with a wallaby. Yeah. That's a lot. Cough blocked by a wallaby on that line.

Yeah. Nice. What else? We got quite a few good chistress. And, um, sorry,

I'm just going to sort of scroll through some photos here to refresh my memory. I think going back to the whole cacadoo thing is we didn't get great diversity, but the specimens that we got of the things that we got were particularly good ones. So we had very, very hot weather whilst we were here. We were in the mid-40s Celsius. You'll have to convert that to Fahrenheit. I'm afraid I don't know, Fahrenheit.

110 or 115 somewhere on there. It was crazy, very humid, what we call the build-up here, which is that pre-monsoon, right? So all the monsoon clouds are starting to move in. That hot sun is belting down, radiating. It's long, you know, 13, 14-hour-long days. Blistering sun. The insects are going mental. You know, we had nights where we were.

clambering around in the rock work, looking for Owen Pellys and other geckos and things. Yeah. Where the moment you turn the torch on all the flying termites and the flying ants would come out. Uh-huh. And so we're just walking through clouds and clouds of insects attracted to our churches. And they're stinging you and biting you and they're all sweaty and wet, you know, suffering with chaf. Yeah. You know, particularly me, I'm sure, all to tell you horrific stories of seeing my life.

exposed backside but one of those guides we had an incident in the Cape it was similar in the Cape but I've been walking around all day unbeknown to me had got quite bad leg chaf because I'm a little bit overweight

from it you know bird watching you don't you don't burn the calories like you do in trade so I've plumped up we found our first canopy monitor up there. Oh, nice. Keith Hornay.

Yeah. And anyway, it was on the opposite side of the creek from us on a fallen tree that had fallen out of the forest and come careering down into the creek. It was there sunny itself. So after a few quick safety photos, I was like, yeah, let's go get this thing now. So anyway, I had to wade through the creek and, you know, I thought, okay, well, I'll take my shirt was already off. So I didn't want my shirt, my shorts, sorry, to get.

get wet because you know i've got pockets full of batteries and all sorts of stuff so off they come here's the guide in his undies waiting through the creek to climb up this log to try and get this keith hornay well anyway unbeknown to me these boys were just getting a very raw look at my back hand we're all just talking to each other like i don't even know how he walks but that looks so awful Yeah, garner a little sympathy and Yeah I think it was on the edge of bleeding

Oh no Like when I talk about We did the grind, we did the grind, we did the grind Yeah, yeah I know I've been there I know your pain Yeah And I think that's a commitment

It says something for you man So the commitment to strip down And give it a go Yeah Absolutely Right Probably was soothing to walk through the walk Well, it was funny because it had crept up on me.

I wasn't aware of how bad estate I was until these boys were like, oh, man, that's a bit raw. I started to look a little bit more closer to yourself, like, okay, I'm going to have to deal with that when I get back home tonight. But by the time we got back to the car, yeah, I was walking like a guy who had been in the saddle of a horse all day. Yeah. Well, and actually, yeah, I know we're supposedly moved on to Kakadu, but that was actually a thing with, and Lockhart that, I guess, Cloud never did it, but Yuki and Dougal and I, all three of us, you know, spent time just lying in the dirt, you know, photographing something or, you know, typically photographing something.

Right. And after a few days, oh my goodness, I would show, I'd be like, do I have like some sort of plague? Yeah. What is wrong with me? Like chiggers and things. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And then skipping forward when we, the, another week after we were done in Darwin,

we went down to Alice, we met up with some other Americans down there who were friends of Dugles and Mary Alice, and they had just come straight from Cape York. And one of them had actually gotten, what do you call it, Bush typist? reptiles. That sounds fun. Yeah, no, she had to, like, go to the hospital. She had these, like, from the same sort of thing. Like, you can just see that she just had all these horrible sores all over her torso, like the rest of us did. Except they were, like, they were going to kill her if she didn't take antibiotics.

And it's not difficult to treat. But, like, she totally had to go to the hospital. Yeah. yeah poor ruth looked like a bit of a train wreck and she she's yeah oh yeah she was in tough say it's good flogging yeah yeah it's crazy yeah you lean down on the wrong patch of dirt and you you don't know what you're gonna get under the skin or things like that yeah i guess that goes for just about anywhere you're herping too yeah there was a few instances where the boys came to me in the first couple of days in lock up like lifting up their shirt and pulling the edge of their shorts down

Like, what's this? Should I be concerned? Like, oh, shit, sorry. Kind of neglected to mention that, yeah, scrubby is a thing up here. So, like, you touched on chiggers, we call it scrubbitch. Tiny minute people might say, obviously, thrive in the hot, humid weather. They sit on low vegetation and the leaf litter and stuff. So obviously, is where getting down and dirty in the leaf litter, you know,

getting the angles and the shots and things of all these pythons that we're saying, you pick these things up. And just like ticks do, they go for all that, those nice, juicy, soft tissue places. They'll typically walk up your leg and get to the edge of, you know, the seam of your undies and then settle there in your groin and bore into the skin of your groin. So before you know, your hand and your ass cracking around your balls and scratching the nether regions, wishing you had a coat hanger or a cheese grater or something. That's a beautiful picture you've painted. You all know what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah.

Good times. Good times. Well, what was the highlight, I guess, in the top end for you, Paul? Let's see. I would say, again, it was there was one evening. So there was one frilly that we found that was particularly beautiful. It was just spectacular. I think I see you guys pictures.

like beautiful orange frill and um we were con the old warrior like its frill was all just uh you know yeah had all these like holes in it like he like a pirate yeah you know pirate ship sick or something like that that was super cool um but the um there was one evening that we spent that was uh you know in a bit like Like, again, it was hard. It was, right. When it was, when it was hot, it was super, super hot. And the bugs, like, who was talking about, bugs were insane.

And there were times where, there were times where I was just like, okay, I'm the oldest one here. I'm just the one who has no pride. And I'm just going to, like, hey, guys, I'm done. I'm calling it. And usually, usually, Claudia, you're like, yes, please. you know where I just like became aware like okay I'm not even looking for anything anymore I'm just basically like zombieing through the bush without just like going completely you know like losing my pool yeah but so it had been hard it had been demanding and

and we'd seen some really cool stuff like the the monitors in particular the monitors were amazing and they were so beautiful and we'd see these other things that I didn't even know existed these lacquer grasshoppers these bright orange grasshoppers that don't even look like they could possibly be real that's cool so you know so I'll correct you there quickly Paul like arts not like hearts yeah okay thank you yeah and and so I think it was going to be our last night in Cacadum, or maybe the next to last night, and it was

pouring green. It was just it was dumping. And at this point everybody's really exhausted. And we go out in our two cars as normal because, like, so Dougal's got his car at this point. He didn't bring his car to Lockhart, but

the whole rest of the trip he had his truck, which has giant's pots on it. Right. So he can say great. And whoever's in the car behind, just sort of when Dougal puts on the brakes, we stop to. And so we, you know, we go out

and we leave the hotel and we get, I don't know, maybe a half hour into the drive and it's right around sunset and Dougal pulls all her. It's like, I don't know, man, I don't, I don't even think it makes sense to go out. And

basically I was just like, on your feet, soldier. No, I just said, Dougal, I'm going to remind you what you say to me, like, every single day. I cannot overemphasize the importance of time spent in the field. And he's like, you're absolutely right. Thank you. That's exactly what I needed to hear.

And so we just went out. Yeah. And it dumped rain. It just was torrential. And it was our best night of road cruising of maybe even the whole trip. Wow. I know we had a couple of really good things Definitely by that point

Yeah certainly by that point Yeah Found a bunch of children I Which at that point Those were the first ones we found And maybe we found one other before that But we found a whole bunch that night We found several of the species

Yeah Yeah Death Adder Oh cool You know we hardly found any snakes In cockado at all right We'd become almost exclusively lizards. And all of a sudden, we're just turning up, like, tons of snakes.

And so that was cool. It partially just didn't, like, it was a good story of adversity overcome. But it was also another one of those great experiences of if you lock yourself into a particular mindset, you're not going to have as much fun as if you had, you know, you just keep, like, okay, I'm just going to be open to whatever experience I can get out of this. right and and it was totally rewarded right we just had this yeah amazing experience at one point again claude and i were in the car behind and dougal pulls over and he's got his flashers on it's the emotions for us to come you don't even want to get out of the car right because again

torrential poorly so we come alongside him and roll down the window and claud Claude rolls down his window, it sticks his, it just sticks his hand out, it just hands him and children's thigh. It's okay, see you later. There's this video of Claude sitting in the car like, oh, what do I do with this python? That's cool. Yeah.

Nice. So that was quite eventful evening, obviously, where we finally started to pick up some snakes and we've got this lovely death adder, which we were very thankful to see because it had been slim pickings by that point. We'd been doing the hard grind. But we spent a lovely day. We did the Yellow Water Coinda boat crew,

so they take you up the river and you get to see all the aquatic birds and the buffalo and all that sort of interesting stuff. So that takes the edge off one day. sort of thing where you've been relax a little bit and sit in a boat yeah yeah that's right because we were using our midday period to catch up on a lot of sleep because we were long long grindy nights where we were only ending up with three four hours of sleep before he did the morning you know things are very crepuscular so dawn and dusk yeah yeah like by nine nine in the

morning you're in the high 40s it's way too hot for things to poke their heads out all the birds, all the reptiles, everyone just seeks shade, you know, water, everything just goes to bed. Right. And so we were doing the same thing. We were trying to work their clock. And, yeah, we, like Paul touched on the fact that we got that beautiful frill drag. And we ended up getting quite a few because the wet season had started.

So there was a lot of mating and territorial behavior going on. So we got some lovely frillies and some realies and some. really good ones. That particular one that he speaks of was a very war-torn, mature, big, and alpha male who was obviously very domineering in his patch of forest and had scars like I've never seen. Like, I've seen thousands and thousands of Phillies over my years, but I tell you what, the thing was just shot to pieces. By God, did he have some character?

You know, we put him up on a tree stump at high height, and we're doing it. photography and we're getting in his face with the wide angles and the macros and all this sort of thing and he's just there belting his tail at us with flashing this because i i have a tendency even throughout the day i still shoot with my diffuser on when i'm doing close macro stuff and he saw that big white um square diffuser on my flash is obviously a big open frilly like in your face like competitive male like you know like here he is like i'm surprised like Like that, I still have that soft box because, man, did he whip the nonsense out? Wipped it.

He had plenty of fun on that, the boat crews. But then we, on the last night, we decided that we'd head down into the sort of southwestern edge of the park into an area where you sort of get off the sandstone escarpment into more of the sort of granite country that then leads. down south into Catherine, into Edith Falls and stuff, an area known as motorcar falls. In the hope of spending a night down there looking for Owen Pelly Python. And we went up

into the creek yet again. Now it was stinking hot feral evening. But the worst component to that is that they'd just done a massive backburn there. Oh no. It's a three-kilometer walk in. I mean, like this was not

a slow burn. This was a hot and so everything it's incinerated like so the walk-in was just like okay let's pound it out let's get into the falls hopefully the riparian forest has put the brakes on the fire and it's not completely burnt

out thankfully we arrived there to find that that was very much the case oh that's good you arrive on this nice boulder-strewn very rocky creek line with lots of lovely monsoon forests and you know wetter forest species and the evening started off really well we were getting the giant cave cave geckos

excuse me um we had some great encounters found some lovely specimens you know like photographing one of them it's uh decided to bite my finger and refuse to let go yeah those are not the ones you want to get them by they're gone they did this like i've not had it like that before and so the boys were tickled pink with the fact there, you know, I was getting a bit of my own medicine, I guess you'd say. We, unfortunately, didn't find the Owen Pelly. We put a big effort in, though we got Northern Quoll and a few other nice treats like that. Oh, and Shay-I, the...

Oh, yeah. We got a lovely Shay-I. Oh, nice. Yeah, and that's where I sort of put emphasis on, yes, go out looking for your target species, but still be open-minded to the other things that there's... there as well you know jimada you know oh we do our um jadas where one of those things well and yes good good nights we we had some good treats but unfortunately cacadu failed to yield glebe by palma as much as we went to more reliable spots that's how the cookie

crumbles you know i mean you can go there's no guarantees you know an almost guarantee pretty religious spots. But, yeah, that three-day window that we had there, unfortunately, we didn't get some. We were pretty fortunate. Across the three weeks, we did pretty. Right. Right. All right. Well, after the top end, where were you headed after that? We went down into the central NT down to Alice Springs and Polaro, and I'll let Paul tell you about that. Yeah. Yeah. So that was super cool.

At that point, we said goodbye to Yuki. He had to, he's got younger kids. So, um, yeah, he went back to, you know, to Amsterdam. Okay. So that was sad, but we did, but we did pick up Mariela as, as we were talking about. And that was great. So, um, Claude and I flew down. and

and Dula Mariela drove which was you know that's pretty far yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah and that was cool so we the first night we went to Ormiston Gorge and the the target was

nominally Bradley but basically again you know following the theme of the trip anything that we could find and

There's lots of fodder out there too. Oh, yeah. I love Oriston. It's such a great place. Yeah. Central Arad Australia just dishes up so many good species. The Deco, you know, the agammer diversity is just through the roof. Like, last year when I went down there, I scored myself 37-year species in one week.

Oh, wow. Yeah. I'm proud of. It's fantastic. I love the Central Australia. It's wonderful. place yeah yeah yeah i think uh that might might have been my favorite of the three regions that we were in um although that's a tough call but um you know because they're also different all three of them are so different but i'm at i'm a desert rat so i'd pick the central i just love

it i think that herping's like a little bit easier um yeah you know far more two-dimensional Yeah. Desert irving's a lot easier than forest irphing, for sure. Yeah. It's been a case, however. Yeah. So we basically we spent one day in Alice and then drove to Airs Rock and spent several days there. Sorry, I'm going to cut you off, Paul. There's a reason for that.

Paul and Claude missed their flight. arrived 24 hours late. Oh, no. Yes. We're so exhausted. I have never done that in my life. You were so exhausted, I slept through my alarm. Oh, no.

It's partly my fault, I might add. We finished Kakadu. We had the evening here in Darwin. I was like, oh, you boys can't come through Darwin and not see Darwin carpet pythons. Yes, you're right, exactly. He can't. yeah yeah and then after that we found darwin carpet python so i was like oh you can't come to

darwin now saying our if you're a file snake let's go looking for those boys right on these boys probably didn't get to bed until 1 a.m had to be that cup at 4 a.m. to get the 5 o'clock fly it turns out we didn't oh shoot so how long did that delay you how when did you get just a day so close night basically um but okay yeah so again so instead of going oh man, I can't believe I slept through a flight. And it did suck, you know, to have to give you your money back when you do that. Right. Yeah.

So that part of it was annoying. But like, okay, well, we're going to go to Litchfield. And we did that. And finding the, the merchants there, that was totally worth it. Yeah. That was absolutely worth it. Very cool. I might add that that was a species we had missed in Kakadu like they typically

yeah we didn't get a Mertons in Kakadu I was as a fly just going oh my god what is embarrassed right one of those things you think is going to be a guaranteed species and yeah they just don't show up and I mean I it took me what eight nine trips to eight trips to Australia to get a Mertons And it was like, you know, I'd been in their habitat, been in the right areas, but just hadn't come across one. Yeah. Kind of crazy. Yeah, Claude found that one.

And it was at a swimming pool in the, in the Nashville swing, you know, like this waterfall that had these series of swimming holes in it. That people go all the time, there was a family there. They're like, what are you looking at? modern lizard and the um and they're like oh okay cool well we're just we'll go around this way they were they were great about it um yeah and we spent easily an hour hanging out just hanging out um and it let us get really close and just got amazing features of it and there's a there's a species of frog that's endemic to that little teeny teeny tiny area there in the park we saw them as well

that they what is it they I'm trying to remember they can jump on water they saw like some superpower ability I don't remember what it is but um

right just adorable little frogs and on the drive home found another water python um so it was that was actually a really really lovely evening and I couldn't believe

okay I totally loved our I really loved Arwin. And I couldn't believe that when we were driving back from Litchfield, so this National Park that's quite like 90 minutes away from the city. Yeah. We didn't see a single car until we were, and this was on a Saturday night, we didn't see a single car driving back from the National Park until we were like 30 kilometers from the city, something like that.

There was nobody out there at home. Yeah. So it was like really striking. how easy it was to be in this small city that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was really fun to hang out there. And then walking, you know, you're in the public parks in the city and those monitor, those who's there and you can go out into the national park outside the city and there's other cool stuff there is just amazing.

That's totally lovely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would go back and actually spend time there.

I really liked it a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But anyways, so yes, we get, when we're down in Airs Rock, that area, we found all sorts of cool stuff. I mean, I think the, I'm trying to think if there were, none of the real highlights were snakes, though. I think they were basically all lizards, the sand monitor. that was amazing we found the DOR one

first and that sucked but then finding a live one and that finally that was one that I actually found like I've been like by far in the caboose in such a huge way

on this trip with actually finding stuff but that one I found because I was paying attention in birds and the birds were mobbing it so that was really fun I was actually a very

kind of flying moment for me is the fact that you applied that technique. Yeah, exactly. Bird fishing, which is where birds, you know, get aggravated and collectively mob a reptile or a predator. And they all notify one another of this predator in their field of view. And Paul had applied that knowledge he had learned and found himself this beautiful gulio.

That's cool. And tracked it down by watching the birds and observing them. And that's one of those things. that you sort of learn from time in the field. Yeah. So I can go back to you. But that was, uh,

that was, that was really like such a majestic animal. So beautiful. Like, oh my gosh. Oh, they're incredible. Yeah. Yeah.

And I was only vaguely aware that they existed before, you know. Like I just, I'm not somebody who reads a field guide and just commit and can just remember all of these species that in my brain doesn't work like that. But, um, when I actually see. see it in the field then it sticks but um but uh but i did know that thorny devils existed before and uh we actually found one of them oh cool so that was great uh that was super cool

we found the other um um nptail gecko um levis levissimus or levice both um oh did we have both of them yeah we did yeah yeah and man oh oh oh and oh and i'll let you tell about your um your your monitors that you that you were so keen to find and we found two of them yeah so the year prior i'd been down there um trying to get gillenai for honest gillen oh yeah yeah and i spent a lot of time in the habitat all away from um we were we were basing katherine at the time last year so you know it's still a sort of 13 hour drive down there so on the entire trip you know once you sort of hit tennon creek you're in into the mulga habitat where they were able to be found and you know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

kilometers of just intermittently stopping in the habitat with dead mulgat trees and you know peely bark where I just go, you know, peel all this bark in the hope of finding this monitor, and I spent days and days and hours and peeled hundreds of trees. Like, just, you know, partially I might add, because I'm very conscious of never to peel more than sort of 10 or 20 percent of bark off a tree. So it's not defoliate the habitat in which you're there to enjoy. Yeah. So.

Which incidentally seems to be a big problem down around Uluru is like a lot of, of the trees were peeled, you know, there wasn't any bark left on them, so it's becoming a problem here. It is. You do see the damage that Herp has too, but that's probably one instance where I'll sort of

turn a blind eye to it, because that country is going to be burnt shortly anyway, so that mark's going to be gone. There's this constant of huge swathes of country, like areas of Central Australia at a size of some of your states get burnt, you know, sometimes once a year, every couple of years,

sometimes even every six months. So for these things to fight and survive and reside there, they're dealing with it at a far greater scale. You could send every herper from around the world out into Central Australia peeling bark for pygmy mold monitors and not do a fraction of the damage that the next fire that's lit will. So, you know, I'm usually very conscious. of herping behaviour like one of my biggest blows on my channel is don't destroy what you

can to enjoy right so I very much have a philosophy of okay if you're in a bit of habitat that you know to be that known to don't go out there and peel every bloody tree in a patch of forest and debark every single bit of that tree you know wherever possible be as delicate as possible. Yep, he'll, you know, go out, enjoy, enjoy herping. Look for the things that you do, but do it in a conscious manner in which you're not going to spoil it for the next time you're there or for other herpers, you know. Or for the animal, yeah. Let them have something to go back under. Absolutely. When I was going next, you know, don't deny them a home or make them fall

prey to the likes of the brown falcons and everything that are out there so eager to kill them. yeah right so yeah on the trip down last year i spent all this time you know i did everything right and i got all the truestrous everywhere and everything else i just did not get pygmy moggometer so yeah on this particular trip i had two key species that i was after that i'd missed from last year and that of course was uh gill and i the monitor but then um bred lie the python the marilla so they were my two targets and of course i knew that targets for these guys as well so yeah the emphasis was to go out and find those but then also everything else and we did superbly down in the arid centre we had ideal conditions not too hot yeah goldilocks

conditions you know like we said we got the knob tails we got you know desert spade foot frogs and pygmy bit dragons and yeah good collection of nice mulga snakes and um and danny yes yeah yeah yeah manning so yes um the good little brachyerofus the shovelnose snakes and things like that we've got some blind snakes too so yeah the uh desert was very accommodating to us and coughed up a lot of good treats and we had it last Did Paul get to experience the shwees of the blind snake? That's horrible stuff. So concentrated that mask. So nasty.

Yeah. But then also. And how are flutons after Justin's favorite? Yeah. Any of the multifacietta or occipitalis? Mulsie facetado we got one DOR unfortunately the day the morning we left Alice just probably half an hour just south of Alice we got a DOR and there was a beautiful animal yeah they're so gorgeous there

I still have yet to find a wild one I've probably seen a half a dozen DORs unfortunately one day just been struck as well I don't expect the car that it over taken us had got it. It's the worst. Let's know we had a fantastic time.

Or what were your highlights from the trip you reckon, mate? I was just to say another cool thing that we did that third week was towards the end when we went back up through

Kings Creek and then back up into Western Max. And we spent two nights at the end up in the Western Max. And there was, we'd spent a day doing this. Dougal didn't really tell us that much about what we're going to do. He's like, yeah, we're going to just go up this canyon and bring a swimsuit. Like, oh, okay, cool. You know, that's why.

He's like, yeah, you know, it gets a little bit narrow. and there's some pools of water. And so basically there's this, this slot canyon that was almost entirely flooded. And there was a series of waterfalls that were maybe, I don't know, anywhere five to eight feet, something like that. With just a trickle of water coming down, so basically they were stagnant pools. And there was a number of, and I guess this is like an ongoing phenomenon that animals fall down, mostly reptiles, but we did find a dead of olivy down there too. Animals fall down from the cliffs above and can't get out. Right, right.

And so we went up there with a couple of dry bags. tuckware containers and like one of those insulated thermal shopping bags right so was a really big and and that was amazing so I mean you guys have been in

Salt Canyons and Southwest I've had the same experience where you'll find a gopher snake or something that's fallen from up above and you just pack it to the place where it's able to crawl out of the canyon yeah exactly Exactly. So that's exactly what we did. Nice. And we hauled a bunch of animals out of there, including another Tristus.

And a super healthy, not particularly compliant, big old Malga. Oh, yeah. That was where the insulated, zippered shopping bag. being in handy. That's cool. And did it say thank you? It did not. But what are the reason?

You have to swim into this canyon. And the canyon above is two to three hundred foot high. It's polished, polish rock from millennia, hundreds of millions of years of water, slowly, you know, making its way through this, this, you know,

cut in the ridge so it's perfectly buffed super polished like kitchen bench top so nothing can get traction on it so these animals are stuck in this this ravine it's like a three-tiered lock system in they like the UK with their loads and they have to tread water until they die and because the canyon gets no or very little very short window like 15 20 minutes of available light penetrating down through it of course for reptiles the water is incredibly cold so they tread water for a couple hours and if they don't die from hypothermia if they manage to cling on to something that's all they've got they can there's a few tiny little beach zones and rocky pebbly areas where the gravel and rock you know being pushed through

the gorge yeah um you know get stuck behind a bit of debris or boulders or whatever so you've got these intermittent little beaches along the way where we'd flip all the gravel to find these species, you know, gecko dragons, you know, you get micro bats down there even all sorts. You know, like Paul said, we had a dead rock wallaby down there as well. So you swim through this stagnant water. You know, one of the waterfall climbs that we had to sort of help each other up through, there's a very unfortunate dead, rotting, decaying, tristress in the water right beside us. So you've got this bloated, maggot-infested, dead body.

bobbing right in front of your face whilst you try and climb up with waterfall. So it's a pretty epic adventure. Yeah, while you're swimming with... I quite accept it to myself. Yeah, that's great. I knew that I'd enjoy it. So I was like, okay, I'm not going to tell them.

I'm going to throw them in the deep end. I'm going to come on this random rescue mission with me where we go pull some treats. And we did. We got some good stuff, but particularly this quite, volatile mongus snake yeah that was a big day wasn't it yeah oh the moguls are beautiful yeah they're amazing they're nice down there yeah they're beautiful yeah fun stuff yeah such a great place they're not just enjoyable to look at like they're they're cool you know mega Aussie alapid

like we can all appreciate the fact that here's this monster alapid that just choose on other alapids Like, you know, a casual walk in the park, you know, they eat snakes and typhans and all this stuff. So they're brilliant at that aspect. But then they are just characters. You know, one mulga, that's the same. They're not one of those just generic snakes, you know, like, it's like your pet dog at home. You know, you can all vouch for the fact that every dog you've owned is a different beast. And mulgas are the same.

And they've got some attitude. Yeah. You know, characters. Yeah, I don't think there's ever going to be a herper that comes to Australia and says, oh, Mulders, yeah, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I've had a lot of fun with Morgas. Finally got one to do the whole reared up coming at you, serpentine style. That's pretty intimidating and impressive when they do that, yeah.

The closest thing to an Australian Cobra. Yeah, yeah. And that was my first trip over. there. We went to Central and Central Australian found a mulligan, you know, just cruising across the road. And it was, it looked like the road. I mean, you know, that black and, you know, kind of black and white speckled look to them. And so, you know, my pictures are horrible of it because I couldn't focus on the snake because it kept mistaking it for the road. But I remember tapping it, you know, on the tail to see if it would, and it would, it would, it hood it up and got all, you know, it was so cool. And then it just took

off. Like I was chasing, you know, running through the desert after this thing. So cool. Yeah. Fun stuff. Well, and that was, that was all she wrote. Was that kind of the end of the trip? Or did you do more beyond there? Well, I guess we go back because I know we sort of got sidetracked on the pygmy moga thing. So we were very fortunate. And pretty much, was it the first afternoon, Paul? Refresh my memory. I think we just walked pretty much straight into a bit of forest. forest and, you know, second tree yielded Pygmy Moldommer. Yeah, yeah. And I think Paul and I together ended up getting, was it two or three with you, Paul? I ended up walking away with half a dozen by the time because we had a couple, Mariella and I took a couple of days once we departed with Paul.

And I wanted, because I'm doing tours down there for the company I could portray to, but I obviously intend on doing work down there. As well, I wanted to go do some recie work and sort of honing on some holy grail sites. That's a lot of what I do. And I managed to do that, actually. So I was very fortunate and got a number of very good pygmy mulga monitors out of that trip. Paul was there for two or three of them. And I'll just quickly look at some photos here.

Got lots of nice mulgas. And then we had the beautiful, we had, parenti as well will pull I think yeah yeah the last day yeah we got a really beautiful Parenti in the West Max or is that

yep yeah yeah yeah yeah they're so cool yeah that was that was just amazing and then that night we um we met up with we were pulled over along the side of the road and all of a sudden this this pickup

pulls up like right behind us and we're just like, oh, man, here we go again with the Rangers. And we're scrambling to make our Ranger adjustments. And these folks get out of the car. They're like, is that Dougal? And it was just some Berper buddies of his. Oh, nice. And so we wound up teaming up with them.

It was another family, dad and two kids. And so we wound up with, I guess, there were seven of us spent the last night in Ormiston again. And we had Red Creek. We did not primarily Red Bank. Yeah, Red Bank. Yeah. And we did not find a bretel, but we found a whole bunch of, children nine.

Stimson's. Oh, excuse me. That old, yeah. And we found a whole bunch of Antweria. And so that was super cool. Like,

because up until that point, the ones that we had found, we had just cruised them. Yeah. And, but in this case, we're hiking them. And, you know,

it's, as you guys know, It's super fun to find something on the car seat, even more fun to find it on foot. And so this was a night where the bugs, the tadpoles were hatching or the tadpoles were coming out of the water and, you know, like new little froglets. And there were all of these just like right down at the water's edge or just a few feet from the water's edge, just all in amber. which position pointed at the water. Oh, cool. You know,

at least half a dozen of them. Yeah. Did you get any feeding on the, on the frogs? We tried. We had pictures of this one where just, mostly we didn't pose them because,

you know, Darylens hit you anyway. Yeah, yeah. There was one actually that we had, we had taken off the road. And so, and so we just moved a couple hundred meters off the road.

and we're releasing it. And somebody's like, oh, I wonder if we'll eat this frog, with this frog right next to it. And when I went back and looked at the pictures, the snake was totally fat. It was already full frogs. It didn't need any more. But so Dougal and I both got pictures of the snake,

literally with the frog riding on its back. As the snake is crawling along, and there's a frog sitting on its back. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. In that little gorge rescue mission, we also got a lovely little Neo in that equation as well. They're beautiful, caramel. Yeah, it was a stunning individual.

Yeah, they're really nice in central Australia. And we obviously waited until that evening to release it in the dark. And same story, we released it. on the edge of the creek and ideal habitat knowing that it'd find all these newly metamorphosed frogs to feed on at its age. And literally, we put it down

this rock and we started doing some photography of it, there were all these tiny little baby froglets crawling up the crop work to get into the grass above. And at one stage one of the baby frogs actually rode the top of this thing's head and I was just like, eat it. God damn it, you did it.

You've been stuck in a canyon for God knows how long. Eat it. Yeah. That's cool. Too much light. They never perform when you want them to, right? But yet again, we got sidetracked. We were talking about Parentis.

We went up this ball. We got this lovely Parenti. And just sat casually in the grass in the bank, chilling out from the midday heat. you know yet again by the cool air on the water's edge and this not a particularly big specimen just an adolescent one but we had another fantastic shoot with that dressing that up of course they're

you know uh the characters themselves lots of tail whipping and tongue lashinging and very photographic uh as they are lots of character lots of charisma so another good uh shoot there because both Paul and I are obviously very keen photographers and like walking away with a nice photo like most people do. But it's just so much fun, you know, like I really can't emphasise to Herpers maybe over in the US

that haven't done Australia. You know, when you're out in these very remote places and you've got the whole place to yourself because it is, you know, off-peak period generally. Right. You know, in Arad Australia, no one's interested apart from Herpers and going out there at this time of the year,

it's too hot for most people. Yeah. So you can safely say that you go out there and you're going to have the entire place for days, if not weeks, all to yourself. Yeah. So it's great because you've got no one looking over your shoulder. You're not under threat of getting told off

by some random do-good-up. Yeah. You know, leave it alone or whatever. It's like, yeah, we will. We're here. We're loving and appreciating it. But yes, we're the same. We're getting some video and some photos.

Yeah. We're having a bit of banter. and, you know, we're having a good time of this thing. So, yeah, another fantastic shoot with the parent here as well. Nice. And I would say, like, in general, we were pretty low, low intervention. I mean, you know, we, we did, we did pose a bunch of them, but, but it was. Yeah, simply.

Yeah, yeah, and it was brief, and we didn't, you know, if, if the animal looked like it was in distress, like, okay, we're done. Right, right. Yeah. Well, your first trip was, uh, sound very successful and, oh, it was you're going to go back? As soon as I can. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big, uh, Cloud's very, uh, cause very, uh, cause very keen to go back as soon as he can as well. And, yeah. Um, so I, I definitely hope to be back there in 2026.

Nice. So. How about you, Dougal? What areas are you interested in hitting or is there no place you've gone? Yeah, absolutely. You've been meaning to go to, yeah. So, Australia is a big place, as you well know, and I've had a bit of a hard life. So now that I'm, you know, I've matured and I've got out of those situations from a broken family

and supporting my mother and all these other things, I'm now in a position where I'm tripping around Australia and my caravan, we're going from place to place, you know, points of interests. And, you know, we'll finish our time here in Darwin before too long. And we'll start heading for W.A. and the wealth of new species, because I've never been to W.A. Yeah, here in for a treat. Yeah, you know, like it's like that trip down into the arid interior where I got 37 new species last year was a big, you know, a big, deal for me because obviously I've spent you know 40 odd years herping Queensland extensively so new species come one or two a year sort of thing but to have got down into new territory like

that and started you know getting big body counts again well W.A with all the species available there's going to start dishing up big body counts again so yeah and not just in herps but all the birds and all the insects and things as well. So I'm really looking forward getting across into the Kimberley, which is our next stop. Yeah. And start targeting all those northern WA species. And then, yeah, Western Australia is a massive state.

Yeah. It's huge. It's bigger than, yeah. And so, you know, there's a lot of country to cover, and I suspect it will take us another five years to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah, I have a hard time picking a favorite spot, but I think it's between Central Australia and Western Australia. They're just, you know, the Pilbara, just unbeatable in a lot of ways. Yeah, we all typically have genres that we like, you know, like on a bit of a step for my geckos. Obviously, that's what I'm so excited about getting into W.A. Yeah. Finding the mountains of them.

But it all depends on what you're into, whether you're just a strict herp or whether you're a naturalist or an entomologist, theologist, whatever John you're into, you're obviously going to find different areas of interest. Yeah. But as a general naturalist, Australia has just got something everywhere and so much of it, you know, like I'm into my fish, my insects, my spiders, the diving and everything. so you know to get across into mingaloo reef and all that sort of stuff really looking forward to the diving and the fishing and stuff over there I'm a keen spear fisherman free diver so there's that aspect of life over there as well but something I feel like I should jump back to is the poor unfortunate day I had to say goodbye to Claude and Paul and they they left Sydney and the you know

It was truly bittersweet and a really tough pill to swallow. But that evening, Mariela and I went out for a very casual evening because we were knackered. We'd had three big weeks. I'd have three big weeks. And I was like, okay, it was more of a recid mission with sort of like very aimlessly. Okay, if we find Bred Lai, we find Bred Lai. Anyway, we went back to a very popular spot close to town,

which we'd visited briefly with Paul when we first arrived to Alice. And I don't know why we didn't do it that evening, Paul, but if we had just gone a little bit further down that same gorge that we visited, we would have found this breadlie that I found the night Paul left. Oh, yeah. I should have just overslept again. Yeah, right. that play home.

Here I am. It's 11 o'clock at night and I was about to give out. But, you know, my famous saying on when I was saying to Paul was persistence pays off. You know, persist, persist, persist, do those hardwards and you do get rewarded. Right. And I thought, you know what? Yeah, I'll paint a bigger picture. There's this body of water and it's sheer cliff face either side.

So you have to literally scale. a hundred-meter rock wall, you know, spidering across the rock wall, climbing down across the water, because the water's cold. You know, you could swim it, but you could get bloody cold. So I scaled this rock wall and got into the other side of the gorge. Oh, okay. And I was very casually just looking around, admiring all the frogs and other things, and then all of a sudden, just in the rocks by the water, here's this lump.

I could see this bend. It's no mistaking that pattern. and I've gone and done it here. And so I squealed out for my dear Marielo to come and join me. Of course, she couldn't. So we then had to opt to swim the gorge. So thankfully, I've got a big dry bag with all my camera gear in it. So I got out the gorge, swam all the photo gear in to do this photo shoot with this breadlight.

But the entire time, and of course I'm still enjoying myself, But that entire time, I was like, Jesus, I wish Paul and Claude. Right. Yeah. You could be here for this. You know, we've devoted so much blood, sweat and tears to finding that animal. And, you know, lo and behold, the night you're not really looking forward. Yeah.

You know, the night they've left, there it is at my feet. Right. I was happy yet I had a bit of a tear in my eye, too. Because we've made a really good friendship. And, you know, we, we, I immediately miss the guy. So it felt weird going herping on my own. Right. With just Mariela, it felt unusual.

We'd spent three weeks just in one another's pockets that, you know, the moment he wasn't there to enjoy it, I was a bit teary, actually. Right. Yeah, we had a similar thing. One of our group had to leave early and head home. He lived in Darwin and Dale. and he left, they, you know, took him, we were out in the West Max, and we had two vehicles, so one of the vehicles drove him back to the airport, and then they came back, and we walked to one of the gorges and found Abrells, and that was probably the top of his wish list.

We were like, oh, man, why did it have to be the night that he left, you know, same kind of feeling. Yeah, not the, I mean, we were very happy to find it. Don't get me wrong. pretty over the moon but um well the next problem you've got then is you you immediately jump on WhatsApp to share a photo and you're like oh that's going to come across so bad yeah well he was very gracious he was very uh happy for us you know yeah and as was paul but you know i was my wife and i were in the creek bed there for half an hour going do we send it to him It was like, okay, let's watch them.

Just as nice like this to Paul and his child. He just says, you snooze, you lose. You went the Aussie way. No, he didn't. Or some salt in the wound. Was that your lifer? Do you've seen them before? No, that was a lifer for me.

Yeah. No, and it was quite poignant for me because I actually worked when I was younger with Rob Breddle. So his father obviously found and described the snake. And I worked with them when I was young in his zoo at the time. So I had a soft spot for Brett Lowe as well because of that association. Nice. So to have found that, that was, yeah, very nice.

That's very cool. Yeah, I was over the moon to have seen one in the wild. That was just incredible. And then to know that you were doing all the right things, because, you know, when it's like, you're happy, part of seconds, Guess you, am I in the right place, am I in the right spot? And you, particularly three weeks deep into a chirping trip where you're delirious running on empty, your head gets carried away. Paranoia kicks in and all sorts of other anxieties.

And so you're sitting there second guessing yourself. What did I do wrong? And we've been searching for a better part of 10 days, you know, every night for, and, you know, getting to bed at 4 or 5 a.m. and getting up at eight or seven, you know, and getting back at it. And just, yeah, it was, you're almost in zombie mode. And then you see that and it sure perks you up. You wake up. We continued on after that.

It was, I think we found it around midnight. And then we're like, hey, let's keep this party going. When found my life for Amy A, that was pretty. And then had a really nice mulga that same night. So, yeah, it was a good night. I was actually trembling. I had to give camera shooting rights to the wifie, which is hard. You know, like, I'm very reluctant to hand the camera over, you know.

A bit of a control freak like that, I guess you'd say. But I had to say to her, hey, look, you shoot for now because I was just, oh, look, they finally got it. You know. Yes, that's awesome. I'm excited to see the pictures. Yeah, the camera shots. I've just come to having just sort of a cumulative. assimilated the best shots from the trip, and right now the tally is sat at 570 images.

That's how it goes, right? Where can people find your pictures? So they can find me on all the social medias, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, as Brother Nature dash Oz. And I'll obviously share some links and things with you guys after this little interview. But, yeah, that's where they can find me. And I've not yet got them up because I'm just fine-tuning and doing a little bit of lightroom on some of those

and getting them fit for, you know, social media. But thankfully, they don't need too much tweaking or anything. But, yeah, I'm going to start putting up some of that content now. Nice. Well, we'll look forward to that. Yeah. How about you, Paul, where can people find your shots? Well, I'm in the same boat. I just actually finished processing the first week of her.

I finished the, yeah, the first media photos now. Yeah. I saw Yuki was posting already. He's posted. Yeah. I get a few of mine at the early release. Great. But yeah, I'll just post them on my own personal Facebook and Instagram.

I think both of those, they're not, like, you can find me, but the content, we have to be friends to see it. but if people say me requests, yeah, I'll approve it. Yeah. Cool, cool. Well, man, it's just epic. I have very fun memories in my first trip, but every trip since has been very fantastic as well, so I can't wait to get back. I think it goes without saying that when you guys are here next year, you're coming with me, yeah?

All right, sounds good. We'll look at you. We're kind of, Rob and I are both. very meticulous planners and so we kind of do all this research and spend years and stuff be on the fly all of the eyes and ears

I'm just being ridiculous there a level and a component of planning is healthy and sensible and getting your time is right and things like that but you know having said that what I say there is still got a component of truth, keep flexible, work on the fly, say that you're going to book

a region, you know, go to Alice, go to Uluru, but leave it at that, you know what I mean, just work on the fly. I can't emphasize that enough with my travel experience, not just here in Australia, but around the world, you know, being spontaneous and working on the fly can pay huge dividends as well yeah absolutely i mean i think our stuff is as much it was out actually out of the first time that i came to australia in 2018 was uh we had had seven years of folks on listening to the merli python radio podcast that then said oh as soon as you come over we'll drop everything meet you take you everywhere go with you tell you all the spots all these things and then that was

sort of true but the feeling i came with i came away from it with was like Okay, I'm never going to be sitting there waiting for someone else to tell me where to go ever again. I agree with you in terms of building in that flexibility and having a total willingness to switch, but I want it to be choice option A, option B, option C, not sitting there going, well, what do I do now? And I think that's mostly what Chester means is not ever feeling like you're sitting there without no one, as much as you can from afar, right? All the different things you can do. Yeah. I think with the vast nature of Australia and the distances you cover,

there is so many things that Kenan can't go wrong. You know, one simple weather system can completely just kibosh that part of the trip for you. And before you know, you're, you know, on the back foot going, oh, where am I going to go? And so obviously to be planned and, you know, have an itineries, you know, still a sensible thing to do, but also have a backup plan. what I'd always stress to everyone that comes to Australia, always at least one backup plan, at least not two. Two backup plans.

Right. If you miss that flight to the Cape, you know, go see the reef, go up the affidant table lands. Right. Go out to Chile go, yeah, whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Oh, well, thank you for sharing your adventures with us, and we appreciate you coming on and discussing the trip. That was really fantastic. And yeah, hopefully we'll get to HIRP together in the future. That would be fantastic. And thanks for having me, and I certainly hope so too. Yeah, yeah. All right.

Well, keep putting out that great content. I've really enjoyed the stuff that you've, especially where you've spent lengthy periods of time in one area, you know, where a lot of, I mean, obviously, we don't have the luxury of taking a month off of work or a year off of work to go. At least I don't, but, you know, go to that. But so it's, it's really cool to see an area or region throughout the year and seeing kind of how it changes. And so, yeah, I'm sure we'll be picking your brain when we're headed up to Iron Range or, you know, those kind of things or you just have that wealth of experience. It's really great. And we appreciate you sharing some of those tips with us and excited to try them out because, yeah, it was, that was a long drive. That was a rough drive up there.

We did it overnight, so we were all kind of tired the next day, you know. but yeah that's and i extend that invite for not just you guys but anyone out there listening as well right yeah i love sharing i i really think that we need to be sharing stuff like this more and have people aware and care and making wildlife and herping you know the thing that's prevalent to our young children their exposure to all this garbage out there you know it's as advocates we need to be pushing more of this content to a our kids and saying, hey, this is the real world, come and enjoy this stuff instead of all this nonsense you're exposed to. And that's why I feel so strongly about sharing my content. But I'll

say that to your viewers and subscribers is please don't hesitate to give me a call. Whether you want to book and plan a trip or just some simple advice, places to go see, I will always help out wherever I can. Oh, that's great. Yeah. And, you know, hit up Google if you're looking to do a herp trip and you need a good guide, you know, that's, sounds like, uh, putting here with fall. Right. Yeah. So what he wanted to see and more.

Yeah. So whatever people want to see. And that was where Paul and I got along so well. He was just like, hey, I, I watched your content. I really liked your reef stuff. Can we do a bit of that? Yeah. No worries, of course.

So we slotted that into the trip and stuff. So, if people want to come just strictly herping, I can cater to that. If you want to do natural history stuff, if you want to see the sights and sounds, I'm very flexible and can help you organize whatever you like. That's very cool. I was going to mention, I took my kids out to Kans area in 22, or just a couple of years ago, 2023, somewhere on there. And went out to Green Island and we saw, or I found an ornate Wobigong, which was pretty exciting. Oh, yeah, lovely. Yeah, yeah, really cool sharks.

but yeah um fun stuff uh i i really enjoy the snorkeling and and stuff on the reef as well and the western reef is fantastic um out w a so yeah you'll you'll have some fun out there unfortunately the great barrier reef is a huge area people right don't quite realize the extent and the reach you know it's coming from poppy new guinea almost you know to brisbane it's $200,000, you know, 1,200 plus 1,300 miles. But it's also in some areas hundreds of kilometres wide as well. So it's an area the size of the states, basically, that you've got to be clear out there. Unfortunately, the bulk of it you can only get to with contracted, you know, reef expeditions and stuff,

and they generally only permitted to show you that one small isolated area and they can be a bit flogged. but people were to come to Australia try and find the little family operator who will take you out to those more pristine untouched places but then also be prepared and if you can save up and spend some bigger money on doing some of those bigger expeditions where you get to the outside reef

it will blow your mind it's nothing to earth the Great Barrier Reef is a phenomenal place yeah fantastic well thanks again for coming on and hopefully we can have you back in the near future. Certainly. I'd love to hear about any herping adventures, especially Australian herping adventures.

That's good stuff. Oh, plenty of photo. All right. Well, we're over the almost to the two and a half hour mark, so we'll probably call it here. And there was one thing I wanted to mention, it was very sad to hear the Tell Hicks passed away and just a phenomenal artist. If you're not familiar with Tell Hicks and his work, check it out. We've had, I never got to meet him in person, but just really have enjoyed his artwork, have a number of his prints at home, and enjoy his artwork at the Cherokawa Desert

Museum. I mean, he and Bob were very good friends, so most of his artwork hangs in the museum there. but very sad news there and wish his wife well and hopefully but yeah what a what an amazing life he led and some amazing work he put out so also we got to hear Rob on his interview on the expert in the idiot podcast so check that out Rob did a great job as usual and had some really I was just super impressed by Adam's backlog. Right. You know, I can't deny it. With us having a podcast and sort of the effort that goes into that and what I think he was telling me that he's put out an episode for the last 80 straight weeks without a miss.

Wow. Yeah, I guess I just was totally taken aback that he's like eight episodes ahead or something. It's kind of wild. That's impressive. Yeah, keep up the good work. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that was all I had. Do you have anything to add?

I saw there was a new flipping tin. started getting into that getting some west texas talk and it's it's always fun you know obviously um well i guess no one on the on the call has any exposure to that so they were kind of it's one thing of you know you or i talk about it you know when we had been there but it's a whole other thing when they're talking to somebody who's living out there and just kind of they hear wait you can't road cruise you have to wear the vest what's a cut you know or i've heard the word cut but what does that mean and all that um so as i say probably halfway through and really enjoying it so far so nice and i started

rob recommended listening to the woodfired herping podcast so i started listening to that listened to uh robert hanson and marissa isham eschimatsu um great stuff and some and kyle elmore yeah another good good episode so i'm i've got you know some yeah and i think rob was on the same page with some ideas for future fight club topics so we'll be back fighting here soon but yeah um some some some good stuff to consider and really a interesting podcast yeah so absolutely good stuff all right well if that's if there's nothing else we'll thank you for listening and we'll thank eric and owen for all the work they do especially owen i mean owen is just the most amazing guy he's just incredible

he told me i had to really really talk him up anytime i talked about him so there you go right at the end all right well we'll get you again next time for reptile bike club see you