Reptile Fight Club - Pros & Cons of Herping with Family with Jorden Perrett

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

In this episode, Justin and Rob are joined by Jordan Perrett to discuss the Pros & Cons of Herping with FamilyWho will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

all right welcome to another edition reptile fight club um my name is justin julander in case you were wondering and with me as always as always, is Mr. Rob Stone. Bob Rock, how are you doing? All good. Ahoy, ahoy. Excited for tonight. Yeah, for sure. Tonight we've got a very special guest, a good friend of mine, Jordan Parrott, on with us tonight. I'm very excited to have him on to talk about some cool herping stories. We did a trip about a year ago in October

and had a great, great time out in South Australia. And so he did a repeat and just improved on what we'd done. So I thought I'd have him on and talk about some of those stories and talk about some other stuff regarding herping. So thanks for coming on, Jordan. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. No, it's about time we had you on here. Trying to think of a good topic for you. So hopefully we do it justice today. But yeah, thanks for being here.

And yeah, Jordan just got back from Australia. You were over there around the same time. Well, just after we were. So yeah, you guys got back in about a week later, I guess, after you got back, I left. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Except you went with your whole family. Yes. And we just went with herping bros, herper bros, and sis, I guess. Right.

Yeah. Very cool. So, yeah, I'm excited to hear some of the stories and, and, uh, some of the recaps cause you were in some of the same areas that we were in up in Darwin and Western Australia and stuff. So yeah, I'm very excited to compare notes, I guess. Yeah. All right. Well, um, you guys having a good season? You got any, uh, you got some good breeding activity over there, Jordan, or I'm sure a lot of your stuff is asleep right now, but yeah. Yeah. My colubrid stuff is all asleep, which is kind of tough because we're 80 degree temperatures right now here in Texas. Yeah. Um,

but I am prepared and most everything's in a, in refrigerators. So I maintain my colubrids, uh, and through the winters that way, just because we can't depend on on cold weather here um but yeah all my pythons are are i've seen locks on just about every pair that i've put together so a dozen or so aspedites have lot pairs have locked up and so i'm hoping for a big year this year yeah very cool yeah you have some amazing Aspidites. I, yeah, I need to get, get, uh, get some from you at some point. Absolutely. Get more room was what I need to do is get more

cable or get rid of some stuff is probably the better answer. Yeah. But yeah, that's cool. I, uh, I've drooled over some of your projects there, but, um, I need to come out and visit you sometime. That's I think, uh, so my daughter just got back from the Houston area. Um, and so, um, I'm sure she's going to want to go back. So it'll be a good excuse for a road trip out to visit you. Absolutely. Just never drop me off at your place and she can go visit all her friends. Sounds great.

Yeah. She was really disappointed. She didn't get to meet you. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She'll finally be able to meet you. So that'll be good perfect yeah and uh i i uh i neglected to thank rob uh last last time we

recorded after christmas uh my wife surprised me on christmas morning with some really cool books and i understand rob had a hand in that so thanks man that was really uh nice of you no no worries i'm glad glad to hear it glad you got some good stuff yeah yeah it was pretty cool that i got the bartlett book in search of reptiles and amphibians and then the two-parter uh the snake handbook to the snakes of united states so i'm excited to jump into those a little bit but yeah thank you for helping hi that was a big surprise. Like I had no clue what she was going to give me. And then I opened that. I'm like, wow, good job. And then I'm like, oh yeah, I remember Rob asking me about those books. So yeah. Did you ever pick

those up? So yeah, she employed Rob and her, her plans to surprise me me so i've got a really cool wife absolutely yeah so i don't know do you have a good holiday jordan you you uh i did it was you know we got back from australia um midway through december and had just enough time to get home take care of the animals and hop on a flight and we spent uh, spent Christmas with family back in California. So the first time getting all the, all my siblings together and, uh, hang out with my mom and had a really good Christmas, spent a few days there. And then, uh, and then came back and had a very low key new year's the best kind of new years. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. We celebrate with our neighbors and they're, they have a, they have twin four-year-olds and a couple older boys that they're, you know, under the age of 10. So we're just practicing our grandparent skills over here. It was a fun low-key night as well. Good food. Cool.

I hope you had a nice New Year's as well, Rob. I'm excited for the year of the snake here. Right. Well, I figured we'd kick it off in a way that was special to us, at least with our Arizona spec, my life for spec. We saw Cracker at the Bluebird downtown. Yeah, so that was really good. And so Jordan, for context, we were listening to Low, the last song before we stopped and went up on the climb was Low.

So that was what Justin put the whole trip YouTube track to. And yeah, really good. And they were great. Yeah, absolutely. But I was thinking about Specs, but yeah yeah we didn't turn it up in downtown denver on you know no i'm so surprised nice yeah that was a fun trip and good music i mean as long as nipper doesn't control the the radio i think we'll be all right with good music but right when when there's a lot of driving to be done it's hard to beat having someone along that's got a good playlist and has good

taste in music. So I gotta say, I know I've told you this in person, but that, that trip, that was a highlight to, you know, we spent quite a bit of time in the car as we bounced all around South Australia. And it was good to have music that, that we could just kind of, you know, jam to and, and, uh, almost felt bad turning it down to have all the great conversations we had. Cause it just really, you know, one hit after another, this trip was interesting. Cause I kind of took a page from that. And about three months before the trip, I started an Apple playlist and shared it with my

daughter who's 17 and my wife. And, uh, and so we, we put together about 180 hours worth of music because we knew we were going to be a fair amount of driving. Um, and what I didn't know is my son, who's six put together a playlist as well. uh he's he's a lot more savvy than i thought he would so he had about a hundred songs oh wow the dj marshmallow uh dead mouse some metallica like i love his taste in music it was was fantastic. That's cool. Yeah, there were several times he's like, can you listen to my playlist? Can I be the DJ? It makes for a great trip when you've got some good music to listen to. Yeah, for sure. That's been a common theme, I think, of our trips. Music is an integral part.

I think it brings back those memories, too, when you hear a song and you're like, like Rob said, that's when we found the speck or that's when this happened. You know, I still remember that. It was Queens. No, not Queens. Yeah. Queens of the Stone Age song from Australia when I found a Woma out in the wild.

And then that song kind of just came on the radio like after we were driving along 80 Mile Beach a bit. So that's kind of what sticks in my head if I had a tail or yeah i think it was like if i had a tail so either that one or i sat by the ocean either of those brings up western australia in my head so yeah yeah and we we just were listening to the radio in the vehicle we didn't have any way to transmit our music because it was like an old hippie van or something. So it was an interesting time. So mainly we, it was my wife and I at the time. So we just relied on, on conversation for the most part because we were out there in the middle of nowhere where there wasn't much music, but yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking

forward to the season I've seen. Yeah. My Womas, I moved them into larger caging. And so I think that's made a difference. They've been kind of displaying more naturalistic behaviors, at least, you know, from my perspective and see them out basking and hide areas that replicate a burrow. And so I'm kind of exciting to see if this is going to help them do better in my care. So always good to make improvements to your animals' housing. Yeah. Ever since when we went to Straslucky last year, I've been wanting to do something different with my womas. Yeah. I'd love to do something different with my Womas. I'd love to do something that more replicated what we saw there. I wish we would have seen a Woma there, but we saw some amazing habitats.

We may have seen their tracks. We were certainly in the right area. It just screamed Woma. We were only there for a few hours and then make the long drive back half the way. Yeah. With five gallons of gasoline bouncing around in the backseat. Yeah, that's right. Next to our water supply.

Yeah. Yeah. That was good times. That was awesome. That stupid sensor beeping at us the whole way. Yeah. That was wild. Right.

That was a bird and now we're out of the airport and we had to listen to it for eight days straight. Every five minutes. Good, good times for sure. Well, um, yeah.

Anything else going on? You guys are, we ready to start fighting? Let's throw punches. All right. So, uh, today we're going to talk about, uh, the pros and cons of herping with family. So Jordan should have a wealth of information after such an epic trip with his family over to Australia.

And, um, I know that Rob and I have both also done trips with our family, so we have some insight into that as well. I guess we'll flip the coin between Rob and I to see who gets to battle with Jordan here. Now I've misplaced my flipping coin.

Where did it go? It's usually right here. Maybe some kids needed some change or something. Pardon the... Oh, there they are. Okay. All right. Maybe this one will be properly balanced.

We won't run into the same issues. There we go. Yeah, it's not my weighted coin. All right, go ahead. All right, tails. Tails. It is tails. It's tails.

Yeah. Okay. Battle Jordan, or do you want to allow me the honor? I think I will allow you the honor with little interjections on both sides. I love, I love playing that role because these wouldn't be good topics if there weren't positive, you know, pros and cons to either side. So, right. Okay. Sounds good. and you can call the next one jordan i'll go tails again tails it is heads so i get a pick either pro or con and good on you cow that's a hard one maybe i'll take the the rough one the the con because i don't i don't want to make you have to say mean things about your family.

Oh, come on. That's all I got is mean things. Yeah. Yeah. After the trip, you're like, you got a big list. All right. Well, and I'm going to let you go ahead and go first. So if you want to present a pro that you enjoy about herping with your family? Well, I got to say probably the biggest pro is give it, giving your family an opportunity to have that,

that insight that we get when we get to unplug and kind of reframe life, that it's not just about the hamster wheel that we're running every day that life is so much bigger and more vast and more important than the stuff right and especially on a trip like i just took you know to spend almost a month in australia with my family and basically be unplugged that entire time you know seeing the kid and watching them light up, you know, seeing, you know, took a trip with my family earlier this year and seeing my son see his first lepless, you know, lep lep and watching him just freak out, not knowing that, you know, those kind of colors even existed in nature as it just models from white through gray to black and back to white again. And, um, there's just something about watching your family light up. So it's, it's hard to, I don't think you're going to be able to win this one just because the ups are so big ups that the few little downs that are, it's going to be tough to win. That's true. No, that's a very good point. I mean, I definitely enjoy. Oh, my gosh. Sorry.

OK, I really enjoy seeing that same thing, you know, the excitement. But by the same token, sometimes you have to pull a few teeth to get them to be excited or to get them to interact or get out. Yeah. So I took my three oldest kids and I'm not going to say which kid it was, but we, we jump out for this Flavie or I guess Gouldie and we're, we're kind of surrounding it, trying to see if we can catch it or something. And so we're just laughing and I dove for it and missed it and it ran and ran up this huge tree. And so, you know, we were just kind of chasing and laughing and I'm like, wait a second, where's kid number three? And they're like, oh, they're still in the car. I'm like, oh my gosh.

So I go over to the car. I'm like, okay, why, what are you doing? And they were reading a book. And I'm like, come on, you gotta, you gotta get out of the car. You know, I didn't drag you halfway across the world to read a book. Nobody's going to want to hear a story about reading a book in Australia. They're going to want to hear about the time you chased that big old lizard, you know. So and the next stop was actually in Echidna and they got out and enjoyed the Echidna. And so, yeah, I think. But I was like, come on. That was a slap the head moment there. Slap the forehead moment. But, um, so, I mean, you know, sometimes you, you gotta make them have those great experiences to some extent. And, um, but for the most part, I don't think that's necessarily a problem or a challenge.

Yeah. I think, you know, when you, when you talk about this, we've got to kind of step back and look at, you know, every family is different. I've got, you know, good friends who are big field guys. And when they take their family out, their wife has zero interest. And, you know, it's like, get me a a pool give me a book um you know some good food and i don't care what you do and and and that works for them and they're happy to do that and the kids may or may not join and um and there's certain families that you know the herper is struggling to keep up because the kids are so focused on nature in general whether or not it's the reptiles and um herping with those families is it's like a force

of nature i mean it's a crew of people that are like-minded uh similar passions they hit the field and they just tear things up so i think knowing knowing who your family is and we and hopefully when we're talking about our own families we do um but i think sometimes people are oblivious to that. Right. But I think setting expectations correctly, because early on herping with my family had some really rough ones. And I quickly realized that there's different kinds of herping. And, you know, if you're looking for a species that, you know, very well and you're very laser focused on it. And I'll use an example, you know, West Texas herping for Alterna, Lepidus, Subox, Bairds. You know, you're talking about very little public land, having to wear a silly vest, you know, walking up a hundred yard cut back and forth for five, six, seven days in a row on the same thing, looking for one thing that you're, you know, one, two, three things. And you're like, you're unlikely to see more than

one of them across a week, you know, next to a dangerous highway with giant trucks, you know, exactly. You look at all that and that's okay. That's one type of herping. And that can be pretty miserable unless your family is ready for that. And that's what they're into. Like they have to be, they have to match your energy level or they're going to be miserable. Yeah. And that's tough to do.

I don't know of, you know, you go out there and a lot of guys who are big alternative guys are solos. You know, you might, even if I, when I go out with my friends out there, they're the next cut down,

I'm in this cut. And then the other guys up the next cut up and we don't see each other. We check in every couple of hours and then at three o'clock in the morning, you know, we might go crash at the same place or sleep at the same rest stop under the stars or whatnot. Yeah. Um, trying to do that with family is, you know, problematic at best. And I think that that's, you know, the tough, toughest kind of herping to do with a family if you know an area really well but you don't have a dedicated target that's a little bit different because being more general you can take your family out and you can show them different things and you're more likely

to get the interest of the family if it's like oh hey look here's an echidna or look at that amazing you know an elk in the glass mountains in west tex Texas is an amazing thing to see at two o'clock in the morning. Jump over a fence. You're like elk in Texas. That's crazy. You know, so not having a target can be can help if you're a little more general. And likewise, then there's, I think, two other types of herping. And that is if you if you don't know much about

the area so one is you know the area and you know the species you're looking for and you're targeted the other is you know the area but you're not necessarily targeting a species and the other two would be you're not necessarily you are targeting species but you know nothing about it so like my first trip to australia yeah that would have been a crazy one to try to take my family to. And then the next one is you, you don't, you don't have a target or you do have a target, but you know nothing about the area. So yeah, not having a target, not knowing anything, not knowing anything, having a target, knowing some knowing the area, not having a target,

knowing the area and having a target. And those four present very differently to herping with other people and i think a lot of what we're saying matches well between you know there's three types of herping there's solo herping there's trips with people where you're actually spending accommodation time car time you're kind of trapped with those people so there better be some compatibility and that's what family herping falls into yeah and then there's like group casual social herping hey let's all go meet in a canyon let's hike around for four or five hours together and you might pair off or whatnot and but at the end of the day you might have dinner together and then you go your own separate ways and you're not trapped but when you're with a family you're trapped if you don't set those

expectations properly and you're not so i think the positive you know the positive being there is you you know your family you can set those expectations and you can choose the kind of herping trip so that it's fun it's exciting and it's fulfilling for everyone who's involved for sure if you're blind to that which i was early on in the game and i just try to drag them along on my trips yeah and those can be pretty miserable yeah for sure yeah i i think i might have ruined my my oldest for for those kind of trips and you know he he doesn't go with us anymore so i i i don't know hopefully he'll come around again when he's older but we'll

see but yeah i i looked at her no i saw recently on uh facebook this is a good example of kind of family being on the same page and driven together uh the pains over in australia joanne and michael pain um okay they just uh found a spencer's monitor over there. So yeah, I met them over in Australia on one of the trips. And so I've kind of been following them ever since. And yeah, he puts out some really cool videos. He goes herping with a buddy as well, but then they do family trips and they'll go find some really cool stuff. So yeah, when everybody's on the same page and kind of has their own targets or has their own excitement for the trip, then yeah, you're firing on all cylinders then, you know? Um, I think, uh, I, I agree. And I think a lot of my trips early on

were kind of more selfish. Like I want to go here and I want to find this. And so I don't want, you know, my family slowing me down or whatever, or, or, you know, we're going here and we're finding this or we're spending this time doing this, you know, and that you have no say in it kind of thing. You know, the, the, I, you'll, you'll do whatever, whatever I say, kind of, and that's not the right way to go about it. And that makes for a miserable trip for sure. So I've experienced those. So my first trip to Australia with Heidi was we I was I was going over to give a talk at the Scales and Tales Festival and I had planned to just do a two week trip to Western Australia on the front end of that and then go over to the East Coast to do the festival because nobody else could go or wanted to go or whatever. And so I was planning to just do it solo. And Heidi said, no, I want to I want to go with you to keep you safe because you're probably just going to grab a venomous snake or fall off a cliff or something if I'm not there to protect you. So she went along with me and it actually turned out to be a really, really great thing. But it was the same kind of thing.

Like I had this mentality of, well, you're on my trip. You wanted to come, but I don't want to change what I was going to do. You know? So like, you know, we first night we go out night cruising. I'm like, okay, let's get ready to go road cruising. And she's like, oh, okay. You know? And then we did it. And then the next time I'm like, all right, let's get ready to go road cruising. She's like, wait, we're doing it again. I'm like, oh no, we're doing this every night. You know, I think I've told that story a few times. So,

but she actually turned out to be the best, you know, one of the best road cruising companions I've had out in the field. Like she stayed awake and helped me stay awake and found, you know, found spotted stuff on the road. So yeah, it was really great having her along. In retrospect, I should have stopped at more roadhouses for showers and things like that. I was just too cheap. I guess that's the other con when you take your family is the whole bill is on your head, you know, because you're taking family members and so you don't split the costs, which is a nice benefit when you're traveling with other herpers, you know, rather than, and I'm kind of a cheap, but, but, you know, I would love to counter that, but I can tell you that it will take a while for

me to recover from financially from this trip. Right. You know, like you say, you know, like when you and I were together out there and when I've, uh, or when I heard, when you, when I heard solo, it's all me, the ticket is me. If I choose to sleep on the ground, I sleep on the ground. That's me. The rental is all me. If I sleep in a hotel, it's a hundred percent me, you know, going with you and sharing that time with you. You know, for some of that, we had a couple of friends with us and split a place four

ways, you know, um, you and I splitting, uh, the rental splitting gas, splitting, you know, and all that. It's like half the price after you get there, you still have to pay full price for the ticket but in countries half price that's fantastic right um but now i had to pay four times the cost for tickets yeah i had and then oh yeah going back to setting expectations i wasn't gonna have my family in the middle of the summer sweating in a tent after hiking you know five six hours till one o'clock in the morning of the summer, sweating in a tent after hiking, you know, five, six hours till one o'clock in the morning and be like, surprise, you know, we get to sweat all night long and then we're going to get first thing in the morning and there's no food around and then we're going to go

drive for eight hours. You know, that's, um, you know, so it is, it is very expensive, especially a destination adventure like that right yeah yeah and there's not a lot of places to stay either it's kind of few and far between so you get what you get you know and it's and it can be a little more expensive that way too if you're out in the middle of nowhere but yeah and i'll give you some more ammo there in australia is is maybe somewhat unique that way but with food availability you know if you're wanting to go grab a bite at a restaurant and they're open from five to seven yeah and the sun sets at 6 40 and you got 20 30 miles to go before you get to where you actually want to be you it's like hey am i going to hit the crepuscular animals and hit

that magic hour and see everything or are we going to eat a crappy fast food meal and then still drive as fast as we can and miss it all? And maybe just catch the tail end of that magic hour. I learned early on that happy wife, happy life. And if she wants to eat, I find a way to make that happen. And I framed this trip as, you know, cause I'd been there before and said, Hey, food is not very accessible. So, you know, and I did, I did a lot more planning this trip, you know, this is something I learned from you and I actually used your spreadsheet and putting stuff together. Cause I don't hurt that way when I hurt solo, I get to a destination and I follow the weather patterns.

And so going with my family and be like, okay, gas station here, accommodations with shower here, but giving you some ammo here. But I had to be a little more restrictive in how I hurt. But in doing that, as soon as I had the preparation done, then we were able to focus on the fun and the experiences of family rather than the other, you know? Right. And so it's different. I wouldn't say that that's necessarily a con, but you do have to, again, come down to setting expectations and, and,

and planning a trip that is a family trip. It's different than going solo for sure. Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, for the most part, like you said, if you've been there before and you've kind of seen, you know, seen some stuff, you know, the area and you know what to expect, I think that helps you plan a family trip a lot better than trying to work it out on your first go around with your family. You know, like Heidi and I were driving across Western Australia and, you know, it was like

a gas station came up and the gas prices were insanely high. And I'm thinking, I'm not paying that. I think we can make it to here. And, you know, and then like by the time we're close to the place, we're running on fumes and she's like, pull over and call. This is going to be the last chance that you pull over and call the car service. And then somebody came and brought us gas. And I'm like, oh, man, I felt so dumb.

I'm like, OK, if there's very expensive gases because it's the last gas station within however many, you know, tankfuls miles away. So but, yeah, you learn some lessons the full of miles away. So, but yeah, you learn some lessons the hard way that way, if you, if you're going to an area and you've never been there or, or you don't have a detailed plan, you know, finding out where the different food or gas or whatever stops are can be, can be a lot more miserable with your family as compared to being solo. Like if I got stuck on the side of the road,

I'm okay to hitchhike and, you know, buy a gas can and go back to the car or something, you know, like it's the heat of the day. We weren't doing anything anyway. So, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And now, um, I know we went to some similar areas that you and I went and, you know, while we were there, you made that comment several times, like, Oh, I want to bring my family here. And I have the same thoughts too. Like, yeah, this would be a really cool place to take the family. And, um, so I want to hear, uh, one, one particular experience was really exciting for me to hear.

So if you would share in that. So, um, for me to hear so if you would yeah sharing that so um i guess it all starts with your most recent book the second edition carpet python book right yeah and the cover shot of that book is just one of the most incredible animals i have ever seen and last year i was planning on i was actually planning on doing my family trip last year. And, um, you and I were talking and you said, Hey, why don't you, I'm going to be down there and I'm going to be in South Australia. Um, not far from when you're going to be there. Do you want to swing by and herp with me for a week? And I was like,

that sounds like a blast. And so I was talking to my wife and I was like, I can't really juggle the two trips in a row. And she says, well, I don't know that I'm quite ready for us to do a big family adventure right now. Anyways, let's put it off until next year. So it worked out perfectly right for you and I to go. Yeah. And, uh, and I saved my bacon too, because I was planning again to be out on my own for a couple of weeks and that would have been pretty monotonous. Some of those drives were long and it made it a lot better to have you and some tunes and conversation for sure. Yeah, that's not a, that's not a trip. I would replicate the way we did it solo and it was amazing together.

So that was one of the best herping experiences I've had. That was really fantastic. along and, and, you know, I didn't know really much about those Flinders carpet pythons, those Flinders ranges. Animals are absolutely incredible in the gammon ranges as well. And so when we went there and well, when I first saw your itinerary, right. And you had everything down there and I started looking up these places and it's a part of Australia I had never really looked into because I'm a big Aspidites guy. And guess what? There isn't any of down there, right? And so for me, it just wasn't something I'd looked into yet, but it was a great opportunity for me to experience part of Australia that I knew you were passionate about that just wasn't on my radar. Like it's such a big, vast

area that we could hurt there three, four, five times a year for the rest of our lives. And we'd never see it all right. Like it's just a huge place. And so for me, it was like, okay, well, this is a good opportunity for me to go and see things that I wouldn't plan a trip around. And seeing the snake on the cover of that book and saying, wow, I have an opportunity to maybe see that in the wild was, was huge. I was like, that would be incredible to get that in front of my camera. Well, and I will say too, that that was the only reason that I was planning on going to South Australia was to look for those snakes, you know, to that, try to find that Python and everything else was just kind of like, I found out, okay, there's these other cool things too, but that was the primary

objective was to find that Python. And of course we didn't, we, yeah, we failed on that, but I had a good time looking and I was really kind of same as you. Like, I'm like, this is a cool area. Like even without finding them, I was like, I fell in love with South Australia. I was not expecting it to be so cool, I guess. It was absolutely incredible. Wasn't it? Yeah. And like even without finding them i was like i fell in love with south australia i was not expecting it to be so cool i guess it was absolutely incredible wasn't it yeah and and you know that that photo um by matt somerville of just an absolutely incredible animal from an area that you and i immediately were just like wow this is it just it was kind of this perfect place that is like i could see myself coming here time and time again. And I've talked to people, um, you know, when I explained to them why we

went down there, I would, I would show them a copy of that book, you know, show them the cover of the book or, or talk to them if they're, if they're Morelia people and say, Hey, did you see the cover of that book? And I'd say, yeah, that, that, uh, inland carpet that's on there. And they're like, that's not an inland carpet. You know, they just don't look like what we have as inland carpets here. Right. And they're just absolutely one of the most stunning serpents I've ever, uh, seen that photo is just absolutely incredible. So yeah. Um, and the habitat is amazing, right? Tlaui gorge, alligator gorge, like how amazing is alligator gorge oh yeah fantastic southern flinders were just ridiculous and what do we see 40 uh shinglebacks yeah it was definitely shingleback trip i know

steve was like what are you stopping for it's just a shingleback we're like you don't understand they're all cool they're so cool um and yeah just everything about there i mean what we saw two snakes total in our entire time down there it's not a very snaky place but it really makes up for it with the geology uh you know the geography of the place and the way those mountain ranges come together and um and the mammal diversity is incredible the invertebrate diversity is ridiculous that one cockroach we found there i still have not been able to get an a good id on it okay um down to family not even to genus i haven't had anyone that's been able to get it down to a genus level yet wow um and then the lizards right just incredible and we only we

found a handful of the lizards but every one of them was just yeah incredible that underwoodosaurus that young one just walking on the road was just nuts right that was fantastic um but yeah so i was immediately smitten and knew that my family would love this place it it reminded me a lot and i think we even said this a few times especially in alligator gorge it reminded me a lot of the sky islands of arizona you know you've got the same type of rock structure you've got the same type of tight box canyons um and i love that my first trip to australia was north queensland and i don't know how to hunt rainforest i mean i know a little bit now my first time there i'm like looking around i'm like i i don't know what i'm doing yeah i feel a lot more comfortable in a desert than a yeah and so i was like show me some rocks show me some you know i

need to i need i need something that's familiar in south australia i just feel like it's home like i don't feel like i need anyone to help me you know don't get me wrong i love any input any bit of input anyone wants to give me and i'll soak that up. But it just, I know how to hunt that kind of terrain. Right. Yeah. And I know that my family would appreciate the cooler nights of the desert dry. Right. It's a lot more comfortable to hike around at night in. And then the heat of the daytime where you can compress reptile movement. So you're not having to hunt 24 hours a day. You've got the crepuscular windows that are going to be really exceptional.

So great for family stuff because you don't have to hurt 24 hours a day. You can hurt three to four hours a day and see tons of stuff. And you can spend the rest of the time in pools and casual hikes and just appreciating each other's company um but yeah to the story we spent uh we got a really nice place in in the mountains where we could just kind of hang out grab some good food when we wanted to and then have a couple of good hikes and our first night out um we found seven echidna and i was just hoping just to see just one echidna right they're so amazing and wanted to show my family that and the monotremes just if i wasn't a big reptile guy i would i'd be nuts for monotremes i just think they're the coolest thing ever right yeah the lower body temperatures the fact that they lay eggs the

fact that they don't have teats but are still milk. You know, mammals are still producing from mammary glands. Just everything about them. The fact that their bill predates the evolution of bills and birds. Yeah. You know, just everything. The bill on a platypus, of course. Yeah.

Just everything about the monotremes, I think, is just really cool. So getting a chance to see not one, but seven of those was really neat. Yeah. Although the ones we saw were kind of a disappointment because we heard something big moving around. I'm thinking, oh, carpet python. And it was, I'm like, dang it. You're kidding. Those were some long nights of hiking, you know.

And then hearing that noise, I was was like what is that big right here you know and it wasn't like a anything in the mammal family bouncing around right it was definitely kind of shoved pushing its way through yeah leaf litter so that's an awful lot like a python yeah yeah that was that was disappointing but only because but it needed to be a python exactly that's the only reason it was disappointing. Yeah. Yeah. Seeing those was a real highlight for the family. And then we saw a huge Underwoodosaurus, which really, for my daughter, you know, she breeds the New Caledonian stuff.

She has a large group of leeches. And so for her to see a large gecko in the wild was really neat. And initially, I actually thought it was a python when i first saw it because it was this yellowy orange head sticking out of a crevice yeah i saw the eye shine from about 20 meters away really and then the head went down and i couldn't see the body i could tell that there was like kind of banding or something and then it disappeared in another crevice and it's like so far away that i couldn't tell if it just pulled its body into the crack or if it was a short animal.

And it wasn't until I got up to it that I realized that it was just this big gecko. And, um, so that, yeah, my heart stopped for a bit there. Um, but that was incredible. Um, and then, but there was no snakes that night. And I just assumed that the trip was the South Australia. Part of the trip was going to go just like ours did. Yeah. For the most part, tons of hunts and spiders, you know, we saw the yabbies and anyone who's into crawdads, man, there's something about those Chirax destructor, right? Like their names are even cool. That's a cool name. Yeah. Blue crawdads. Right. And my son, he's like, dad, I don't want to call them yabbies. That's a horrible name. He's like, please don't call

them yabbies. And he'd get mad when I called him Yabbies. So I said, you know, their other name is Chirax Destructor. And he's like, oh, that's cool. So he was calling them Destructors. So that's, I thought that was really neat. And then we spent the next day, you know, we went to the Burkina Gorge and the Eddie Akron spike. You and I didn't go there and I didn't realize it, but it's the, it's the type locality or the type section for the,

the Eddie Akron period, which was the first geologic period in 120 years to be acknowledged, declared by geologists. And that was just in 2004 so it's really we went out there and and me and my son are big into dinosaurs well my daughter as well um and so it was really neat to go out there and know that that was a historically for for paleontologists and stuff and geologists that that was a big deal is to see that type section of geology there was really really neat i wish i knew a lot more about geology i'm just blown away when i see stuff like that so yeah and australia is like geology everywhere like really cool geology yeah not everywhere you go yeah um and then later that

day you know we had a good dinner and then it's like all right let's let's get out let's get some herping done it's the sun's gonna dropping. It's time we can see stuff. So we get to this trailhead and we're getting our packs strapped on. We've all got our water bladders. We're making sure everyone's good to go. And my son says, dad, when are we going to go snaking? And I said, his name is Jackson. I said, Jax. But at any second we could look up and on this trail, you could just see a six foot Python crawling across it.. I said, Jax. But at any second we could look up and on this trail, you could just see a six foot Python crawling across it. And I said like that one right there and literally right in front of us, we hadn't even stepped off the trailhead onto the trail itself.

And there's this almost seven foot long Morelia perfectly stretched out across the trail. And I just, yeah, my jaw dropped. I was just floored. And it was every bit as pretty as what I had expected from the picture on the cover of the book, right? Like it was just the same colors, the same, I mean, everything about it just was like, wow, this is exactly what Justin and I were looking for. So immediately I grabbed my phone and I tried to text you right that second. I hadn't even taken a picture of it aside from a shot of video as I walked up to it. Cool. And, uh, and then I text you and I, um, but it, it just said undelivered because I had, you know, it was under SOS, you know, or out in the middle of nowhere, there's no service.

I was like, of course, why did I even try to do that? And I spent the next, here's another part of herping with your family. I could have spent three, four or five hours watching that animal move until it crawled up into a tree. Like I would love to have spent the evening with that animal. Yeah. I couldn't ask that of my family. They traveled all that distance. And, uh, so I, I got my photos spent

probably half an hour with it. Got the big boy camera out, snapshots, snapshots shots. And then we let it just crawl on its way. And we, you know, continued on our evening. Yeah. And the whole time I kept looking down going like, it should be nice if I had some wifi signal. Cause I know Justin would love to experience this, right. Just send him a couple of these pictures. I know he'd be impressed. And I almost felt like I robbed you. I know this was like, you were so passionate about it and you invited me and we went down there and got skunked. And so for me to go there and, uh, and, and have that family magic play its hand and just

bam, find exactly what we're looking for was incredible. Right. Yeah. We hiked several miles. We get back to the, the trailhead. We get back to our place. We sleep. And the whole time I don't have any wifi, no cell service, you know, here's in the middle

of nowhere. Yeah. But I could not sleep because the whole night i'm thinking because i know that you had the coordinates of where that original snake was found we weren't too far from that but that certainly wasn't an expectation that you know that that meant anything other than we were in the right area um but i was like there's something about that snake that just it's it just was so familiar.

And I just kept telling my family, like this thing could be related to that snake that was on the cover of the book that I was telling them about for months before we went down there. This is what we're going to look for for a few days. And, uh, so yeah, the sun comes up. I've not been able to sleep all night. I'm so wired about that find. Definitely one of the top five, 10 finds in my life. And, uh, so I'm like, well, I'm going to, I'm going to go down to the

park headquarters and, uh, which wasn't too far away from where we were staying and, and they've got wifi down there. So I went down there and, uh, before I called you, I threw it up on Google. I was like, I wanted to download the picture of the book and compare. Yeah. And wouldn't you know it, it's the exact same snake that Matt Somerville photographed five years later. Like, I mean, the feeling was just ridiculous. I was so weird. Yeah.

And separated by seven years. I mean, that's when Matt. Five years is when I talked to Matt. He says it's about five years. Yeah. incredible. Yeah. And separated by seven years. I mean, that, that's when five years is when I talked to Matt. He says it's about five years. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And, and, uh, I swore you to secrecy cause I already planned to meet Matt. I'd never met him in person before, but was going to see him in person two weeks later on our trip when we finally got up to Northern Queensland. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I called you as soon as i saw

that i just it took me a while to catch my breath and then dialed you up and i was like justin not only did i find one it's the one that was such a cool call to get too because that was i was just so excited you know just to you know to to know that it's still out there you know, just to, you know, to, to know that it's still out there, you know, and that my buddy found it. That was just so cool. Yeah. And with his family too, you know, that's yeah. It was wild. And my wife was hugging me like all night. She's like, I know you're so excited. That was such a cool thing. I know this is so big for you. And so that kind of goes into the positive, right? They got to see me super passionate. I mean, acting just, I don't think my son seeing his first echidna or the first monitor we found or any of the other stuff, I don't think he got as excited as I was about that. So letting my children see my passion and to see that and not just something that I'm interested in and like I'm like a crazy person driving out and hiking through the middle of nowhere all the time. But to see me find what I was looking for, exactly what I was looking for and light up. Right. So, I mean, if you're going to take your family and find a, find a carpet Python, why not find the one from the cover of the book?

Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, I guess Heidi kind of did the same thing for me too, because we were were supposed to be it was the tail end last day of our trip in Western Australia. And we'd gone through this area and there were several DOR southwestern carpet pythons in Bacata on the road. And I thought, this is the place where we're going to see one. And I said, you know, I want to stay till dusk. And she's like, what? No, we've got to be down at our friend's house in Perth. And I'm like, I know, but I just got to give it a shot because, you know, when am I going to be back here? Well, it turns out the next year. me a half hour after sunset and that's all i'm asking and so we we and sure enough this big

beautiful southwest carpet python was coming up onto the road gorgeous animal just the perfect example and i'm like and she you know she saw how excited i was and how much that meant so i think the same kind of thing you know she's like okay that that was that was worth it you know yeah i was just glad it happened and i think it's part of that family magic where you know like i don't know wait i'd be hiking with heidi and this is more to your side of course but uh hiking with heidi and some gorges and and she's like we got to get out of here it's getting dark there's going to be these venomous snakes coming out and i'm like nah this is a well-traveled trail we're not going to see one and around around the next bend, sure enough, there's a mulga crawling out for its evening routine. And she's like, there's one. And I'm like, I got to

show her like, okay, watch this, you know, and I'm videoing and, and, you know, taking pictures and all sorts of stuff. And she's like, don't get so close. And I'm like, okay, watch this. And I stomped my foot and the snake looks up at me and takes off. You know, it's like, didn't want to have anything to do with this. I'm like, that that's what they do they don't want to interact with us oh okay you know so it kind of made her feel better about it although we were coming we missed our turn out of the canyon and we went a little further and she's like we're lost now and then she saw another one another bulga and i'm like oh my gosh you are like a magnet for these snakes i i gotta herp with you more often you know so yeah and then we were going back we got back up to the parking lot and we were

headed for the car and uh ringtail dragon or something ran through the underbrush and she about crushed my hand she was like oh no it's another one i I'm like, honey, it's a lizard. Release the death grip. Yeah. But that was, that was a good time. Yeah. Good, good memories. Yeah. Yeah. Great memories. And I think that's another big positive for taking your family with it is letting them know what it is that you do. Yeah. You know, I know that most Americans think that Australia is the place where everything's trying to kill you. Yeah. And the reality is after you've been there, it's the safest place I've ever

herped in my life. Right. Um, I've never felt more comfortable than when I'm in Australia because the reality is, is where, where else can you hurt that you're at the top of the food chain? As long as we're not talking about the top end within 50 yards of water, right? Yeah. You know, Australia is just a magnificent place with incredible people. You know, so much public land and incredible diversity of everything. And to let your family see that and see why you're passionate about it. And it's not that you're an adrenaline junkie that's doing this and that, whatever. And, you know, for, for those of us with, uh,

kids and kind of getting on in life and people think you should be slowing down. And then they hear you're going to Australia and they think, you know, what are you going to do next? Wingsuit jump off the Swiss Alps. And it's like, yeah, you totally are missing the boat. Like it's herping West Texas and the Sky Islands of Arizona is, I would think, orders of magnitude more dangerous than herping most of Australia. Yeah. You know, because what's the most dangerous animal on Earth, right? It's people.

And there's just no people in Australia where we go. Yeah, exactly. And the people you do run across are, you you know some of the best people i've met on earth you know i just can't say enough about the people uh down there either so that i think is a huge positive for our families to see what we do and see that well australian animals might have the capability more animals have the capability of doing great damage. You really kind of have to be a here, hold my beer, watch this type of mentality to get yourself in trouble in Australia. You know, keep your hands off.

Don't put your hands where you can't see them and don't swim with saltwater crocs. And if you do that, you're coming home. Yeah. Don't swing over a stingray either that might yes yeah yeah don't want to swim over top of those i hear that's dangerous i've heard the same yeah but yeah that's uh i think um the that excitement with that you can share with your family and then those memories um and you know i think there is different views and things. Cause I remember coming home from the trip with my kids, my three oldest kids. And I said,

what was your favorite part? And they said, Oh, hanging out with, you know, the Kuligowskis or the Birches or whatever. I'm like, we went all these cool places and that's what he's. But yeah, they loved, I mean, they consider him like second moms or second dads kind of thing. And they just loved the friends that I had over there and just had such a great time with them. So they, after we got back, they were talking about moving to Australia. They just loved it so much, you know, for, and the people are a big part of that. So yeah, that's cool. So I was a little disappointed and I'm like, come on guys, I showed you,

you know, all these pythons and didn't that mean anything? I remember in the late eighties, I think it was my, my brother was, I've got two brothers and it's the middle brother and we were herping dad and, and my brother, Steven and I in Anza Borrego. Yeah. And we, we I think had seven rosy bow a night. Um, it was probably a 50 snake night. There was just Ruber everywhere, liar snakes everywhere. Like it was just one of those incredible nights. It was crazy. And we get home and, uh, you know, my brother was pretty young at this point. And my dad says, tell mom what we saw. And my brother says, we saw a deer. That's like not the Rosie Bowls.

You know, it was pretty funny. But it is interesting to see what captivates, what catches. You know, and as we're talking about that, I think that there's a spectrum of herpers. And I think we all find ourselves at a different point at different times in our life from, you know, whether it's, you know, I grew up in Southern Canada, catching garter snakes by the creek and, you know, you keep them in a box and, you know, hopefully they live for a while or they escape and it's not too far to the nearest Creek with leopard frogs or whatever. But, you know, you kind of start off and you start getting into something,

you kind of have some laser focus and you start a little bit of Dunning Kruger gets in there, right? You like, you think that you're the snake person. Everyone calls you the snake person and, and, and you just so focused on that and taking people herping with you when you're just so focused on that. And taking people herping with you when you're that person is not going to be fun for anyone, especially your significant other and your families. Just that person is not fun to be around. But I think it's more important as you get later on in the stages to take those people under your wing and help open up the world to them. Right. And then from there you get to these people, uh, we go through a phase where you start getting a lot of knowledge about your local area and about stuff. And those,

that's a little more fun, but at that point, there's still a lot of ego involved and people are usually gatekeeping a lot of information about their area and then as those people progress and i and i think unfortunately it happens when you start getting a little bit later on in life um for a lot of people but you become this generalist a kind of a holistic herper i like to call it where you're as enthralled with the pine tree you just walked underneath. And you notice the, the corcus species that you're, as you're hiking through the sky islands of Arizona and you start making

connections between, you know, you used to think I'm just a reptile guy. And when you come to realize that it's almost as, if not more important that you understand the rock structures, that you understand the plants, you understand the invertebrates that you're seeing. One, it's a great distraction when you're struggling.

Two, it tells you exactly where the animals are and what they're doing, why they're doing it. You stop grabbing every snake that you see and you start herping with your hands behind your back, walking at a slow pace, stopping every 10 steps and just absorbing nature. And if you ever have an opportunity to, to hurt with someone like that, um, it's just an incredible experience. And I remember the first time I really had that epiphany was herping with, uh, Bob Hanson, Robert Hanson, and just, you know, we were looking for, I think we were, we were just photographing Zanata and, you know, they're looking for, I think we were, we were just photographing Zanata and, you know, they're plentiful when you get in the right habitat and they're just every crevice you look in, you see a flash of red and just, you know, I love herping

for Zanata, but for me at the time it was like Zanata, Zanata, Zanata. And I was talking to Bob and I kept asking him questions about trips to Mexico that he took and, you know, some different stuff, but I was so focused on the snakes and he would just, you know, Oh, here, this pine tree, they're called, I forgive him what they're called now, but it used to call him a digger pine. And, uh, you know, then he started talking about this plant over here and this species of lizard and how this is what, you know, this animal feeds on. And, you know, with, and I just started looking at that. And, and for the first time I was like, wow, like I'm herping completely wrong. You know, I was, you can find a lot of snakes that way. Yeah.

That's true. I mean, you can find a lot of snakes without doing all that, but when you have that, it's like, I don't know how to explain it. It is a whole nother ball game. And I have an opportunity on this trip to hurt to hurt with uh tony bright he is an incredible herpers he's got some friends in the u.s he's an older gentleman but just a wealth of knowledge and him and i hurt mary king cross national park in southern queensland and he worked there and i think he Mary King Cross National Park in Southern Queensland.

And he worked there and I think he was a naturalist, some kind of a naturalist role with the national park there. But we spent a couple of evenings together and he's another one of those that I was just absolutely jaw on the floor with his wealth of knowledge. Every fungus that you walk past, he could tell you a story about it. You know, telling you, talking about the different figs, the strangler figs and how they form and what goes on. And he pointed out one thing that I thought was really neat. I looked down and there's, he's like, see all the leaf litter. And so I looked down and there's no leaf litter and you're in a rainforest with just tons of leaves. I'm like, yeah, what's up with the no leaf litter?

And he's, and he says, look over here. and he points out that there's these giant earthworms that gather the leaf litter and then pull it down into the ground and so there's no leaf litter it's literally you're in one of the most dense forests and there's no leaves on the ground and it's because these earthworms gather them up every night and i never even thought to look at the ground and i'd like to consider myself in that latter group of herbers where i see and notice but i'm so focused looking for angle-headed dragons and hoping to see a red belly black snake sitting out in the sun or whatever else and um but just yeah if you ever have an opportunity to hurt with people on that side of the spectrum you got to do it and it really can help you see where you are taking that back to the family thing is when you get to that point

then you can cater your trips to whatever level of interest you know my daughter being into geckos we had some incredible gecko time together looking for geckos um and had a really incredible experience in the in the rainforest and Atherton tablelands. I don't think I've told you that one yet, Justin, but had a real incredible experience there. And then with my son going out to the black soil region around Winton and Longreach and looking for Spencer's monitors and finding blackheads and the amount of the fossils and stuff that's out there. And to share that with my son that we went to the Australian age of dinosaurs

and, um, and got to spend time with, uh, watching a real paleontologist, you know, going after these, cleaning up these fossils and talking about it and, and it was just a really great experience. But when you have that breadth of knowledge and breadth of interest, then you're going to be so much more relatable to your family and you can make sure that they have that experience that they're looking for. Right. Yeah. And I think that that's really important.

That is cool. Yeah. I, I, uh, I thought I was diversifying by being interested in birds, but man, you're, you got geology and sex. Yeah. I'm like, I didn't even look up that species of roach yeah yeah that's a wild thing so when we were up at um in kakadu i photographed uh a praying mantis just a gray praying mantis didn't think anything of it yeah threw it into inat just because i needed an identification of course there's no way i'm gonna learn enough to get it down to even the family i knew it's a praying mantis and that's good enough yeah exactly but i put it in there as just a general praying mantis and it comes back and several things down and people are saying you know like i was trying to compare it but i don't

there's no photos of an adult male of the species ever that might be the very first time one's ever been photographed. And I was like, wow, you know, and I had something similar like that happen when I was in Canada, I photographed a moth that had never been found in Canada before and had several people reach out, including the, one of the big insect people in for the province of Alberta reached out and wanted all the, all the details on that. And I was like, Hey, it was just a, it was just a butterfly that landed on a plant in front on that. And I was like, Hey, it was just a,

it was just a butterfly that landed on a plant in front of me. And I had never seen one before. So I photographed it just to get an ID, you know? So it's neat to, to just be aware of everything that you see and take note of it. And I think tools like INAT are too much maligned oftentimes by people who consider themselves like dedicated herpers. Yeah. But at the same time, I think there's people who lean way too heavy on it. There's people who look at INAD as, Hey, look, um, here's where they are. Let's go find them. Whereas I look at INAD and I'm like, why is there this gap here? I need to go spend time in that Canyon and find them and see what they look like there. You know, and it's almost a fill in the blanks. It's a challenge to me. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times those gaps are where just there's no trails or touristy spots

or, you know, that's usually where you have the majority of things is where there are more people. And I like tend to get out of those areas and go to places where, yeah, there might not be. But I think that's the, I do think that's kind of the luxury of having that experience. Like, you know, you said, when you've been there and explored it yourself or you've seen a lot of this stuff

and you've kind of experienced it already, there's less pressure on like finding certain things or seeing certain things and more just general, like, let's just soak it all in and see what we can see kind of thing. I mean, not to say that you've seen everything there is to see in South Australia. So, but you know, I think it helps you settle down a little bit and just kind of take the trip and enjoy it more. Whereas when you're like, have a, have a target or a list and you're just like okay now we got to get to this spot to find this thing and you're you're just driving and and you know it can be a little i think you can miss a lot of things like you said and i think you miss you

often will miss the magic when you're too structured right exactly and i think that's one of the reasons you have have family magic is the same reason why you can hunt for a species for years um you could be in a canyon for a week and then you see some group of birders walk out of the canyon and you start talking like oh i'm looking for this and they're like oh we saw three of them yeah because they're not looking for them you've got this predisposed i'm trying to do this when you go in there with your family rather than going with a group of other herpers with other herpers you're looking you've got this search image burned into your brain it's like i'm expecting to see this you know green rat snake crawling across this rock structure here with ocotillo sticking out here and this and this and this you're looking and you

don't think to look up in the carcass and be like, oh, there's one right there. And I think going at it with people who have completely open expectations or just filled with wonder of every aspect of what you're seeing can help you like, oh, wow, look at that. And birders tend to sit still more. They tend to just kind of park and wait for the things to come to them or to come to a certain tree or whatever and so they're they're observing everything around them rather than just you know trying to move through as as far you know get get through the environment or as far as you can through the environment to search as much area as possible to find that thing and sometimes i think the snakes here is coming and they hunker down. And I remember Casey Lazzick telling me a story about the time he was stopping for lunch. They

were looking for one of the tricolors. I think it might've been Zanata or something like that. And he sat down to eat his lunch and he said, one just crawled up behind him onto the rock as he was eating his lunch and basically crawled past his shoe. And he said, he just went, wow, you know, that's, and so he was the one that kind of told me sometimes, especially like for monitor lizards or something that are so wary, he said, you'd find a spot that's in the right place and you just sit down and wait and you'll probably see them that way, you know, and it's good advice, you know, just kind of slow down, take it all in, see stuff. I remember we were driving through Southern Queensland or kind of central Queensland and on the coast. And my daughter saw a dog and she's like, oh, look at the little puppy.

Let's stop and pet the puppy. I'm like, you want to pet some strange dog out in the middle of nowhere? Like and she's like, oh, please, dad. I'm like, OK, fine. So I pull over. We go back and pull over and she's cuddling with this dog. okay fine so i pull over we go back and pull over and she's cuddling with this dog and it just you know there's a house up the way or whatever but the dog she's like dad he's looking up in the tree and the dog was looking up at a frilled lizard

and she's like dad there's a huge huge lizard in the tree i'm like oh that's a frilly all right you know because i wanted to show the kids a frilly and if we wouldn't have stopped for my daughters you know wanting to cut a dog we wouldn't have never have seen the frilly you know yeah so i climbed up the tree and brought it down we had some fun videos and some you know fun times of the crawling up me you know and trying to attack the video camera and stuff it was it was a blast you know and we just wouldn't have had that if i wouldn't have listened to my daughter you know again that family magic. So, yeah. Yeah.

Sometimes you just listen and follow their interests, even though, you know, I'm like, oh, I've got we got to find this in this area kind of thing, you know. Right. Yeah. Well, and even Justin, so that your story, Casey and Zanata, all that reminds me of when Eric and I were out there with Brandon in the spring. And I actually so sort of family magic from afar. So I'd gotten a call. They had taken the dog to the vet for a regular checkup or whatever. But there was some tale of woe to come out of it.

And so they called me and I had service there or whatever. And we'd been looking for Zanata in a usual place, not the place that Justin turned up our lifer. But anyway, so I'm on the phone, I wind up 50, 100 feet behind the other guys, I'm walking back down the trail. And one did crawl right and right out in front of me. You know, we hadn't seen anyone, we're out looking and all this stuff. I'm on the phone. And I'm like, Oh, hey, guys, you don't want to see this. And out of you know, just literally crawled out right in front of my foot. I can't tell you how many times I've had that play out with pyros.

And we, you know, we joke amongst a group of friends of mine that have spent a fair amount of time looking for them, that you want to be the last person in the group walking down a trail because the first people will kind of spook them and get them going. And if you lag just a little bit behind them, they'll, you'll oftentimes we'll see them because they'll kind of hold position or be tucked in. And as soon as they feel the footsteps go away, they'll kind'll oftentimes will see them because they'll kind of hold position or be tucked in and as soon as they feel the footsteps go away they'll kind of try to get away a little ways off the way and you'll you'll see them that way and a couple times well one time in particular we had i was in a canyon and was so excited because i'd already got a willard eye price eye and lepidus and i was like man we just need to knock a pyro out and you know we'd have all of it like

right here and one in one one morning right and it was maybe an hour into herping we'd already ticked off all of them right all the montains that's cool and uh and we're just and i'm i'm starting to get like almost neurotic about it right it's like we got to find a pirate we got to find a pyro like i've got a i've got to have this story to be able to tell if I'm ever invited on a podcast 20 years from now, you know, I'm like, I got to find a pyro. And so we come down in this, we're down where the Willard, I are, you know, where it's a little more riparian, a little more wet. And I'm like, well, I want to get to where I've got a little more Southern exposure.

And so I'm trying to kind of trek through this area. And there's a lot of trees that are down, you know, kind of typical, like I say, Willard, I habitat and, and I stepping over a log and my wife goes, um, there's a snake, there's one, there's one right there. There's a snake. And I'm like, where, and I'm looking all over and she's like, it's between your legs while I'm straddling a pine tree. And so I can't see that there's a snake between my legs and i don't know is it a lepidus is a you know is it willard eye is it a price eye like where it could be any of those and i'm like what snake is it like what do i need to do and she said and and i just kind of lifted one leg and kind of come over and she's like it's a mountain king and sure enough there was this huge pyro like just a big old bomber pyro um and i reached down and and picked

it up to move it over where i could photograph it and it just bit the crap out of me and my hands swole up like it was a venomous bite i don't i must have oils from various plants or whatever on me that just interacted but it that's one of the worst bites i've ever had in my life it's all numb and swole was all messed up for a while but uh you didn't care much i'm sure i was so stoked you know to get that fourth one in the same all in the same morning so that's cool um but yeah there's something about seeing that tricolor flash that's uh yeah makes it memorable right right absolutely and the conversation it kind of trended in this way i know this gets us a bit off topic but it had come up are you justin i talked about this a lot in terms of going fast or slow and he alluded to that previously right

so if you're in that habitat especially on a trail if you're going quickly or slowly or whatever so last last spring in utah i was going you you know, we hadn't seen any that were on this time crunch and I'm like, okay, I'm just going to burst it to the end and come back. Meanwhile, the rest of the groups, again, to your point, Jordan, you know, maybe five to 10 minutes behind me. And in the middle, there was a mating pair of Utah and for labialis right in the middle of the trail that I, you know, it just, obviously they weren't there. Not least I would have stepped on them if they actually were there, but the whole, the group calls me back and, you know, walkies me and says, Hey, what?

You didn't want to stop for the mating pair of pyros. And it's like, well, they absolutely weren't there, but yeah. I don't know if you have takes on fast, slow, or if the answer is the mix. And maybe that's kind of the thing, right. Is you get someone who's kind of the rabbit, so to speak. I think it comes down to, you know, what type of a herp trip is it? If you're looking for something specifically, that's a different answer than if you're just looking for everything.

You know, if I'm, if I'm very much looking for one thing, I might go quickly in habitat that's marginal to, you know, poor and get to where I think it's good. And then I will take my time. And like I said, one of my favorite ways to herp is take a few steps and then stop like an uncomfortably long time and just watch and listen. And, you know, we being herpers, you guys know this, but you'll you'll find as many snakes listening as you will seeing. I mean, there's just, they make noises, they move through the, through the leaf litter. And so just paying attention to what's around you and taking that time seems to pay off for me more than going, but I go quickly from spot to spot to spot and then take my time when I feel like I'm in good habitat. And again, that's if I am looking for something specific, but if I'm looking, and this is what I love about

Australia is there's so much. And Justin, I remember you said, Hey, I'm, I'm super willing to help you out, find anything. Just let me know what's on your list. And I was like, I appreciate that. Yeah. I'll get you a list. And I started putting a list together and it's like, well, basically I want to see everything. Yeah. Right. You know, it's like, so it's, it's not even worth me saying that to you. It's like, I just, we want to see it all. And I, and when that's your target, then you just take your time. It's almost take a step. And then just by osmosis, take it all in. Right. And then what did you see?

Wow. I saw Huntsman. I mean, we must've seen 15 Huntsman species, you know, it's like a different looking Huntsman and then what did you see wow i saw huntsman i mean we must have seen 15 huntsman species you know it's like a different looking huntsman and then take another step and what do you see and here's this armored cockroach or a pie tin beetle uh something that looks totally alien you take another step and you know like i say it's the first male you know praying mantis that's ever been photographed adult male and you take another step and it's, and you just, when you can herb at that super slow pace, because you're just excited to see everything. Um, I think that's the most fulfilling, right? Like that's everything's magic when you do that. Right.

Yeah. And it is nice. I mean, I think that takes the pressure off a lot too, when everything's on your list, you know, then anything you find you're excited about. And I think that kind of the the trip to south australia although you know i i will admit that carpet pythons and maybe some nephuris were high up on that list i was happy to see anything and we got a bunch but considering we saw zero nephuris zero strephuris yeah and no almost no snakes definitely no pythons um but we saw a bunch of those kind of the the dragons that i hadn't appreciated that you know were only found in south australia you

know that kind of thing where it's like yeah it's it's pretty cool but yeah to to miss out on what would be what you'd say were our top three or four animals to only see two snakes and what eight days in country. And yet still to say that it's one of the best herping experiences I've ever had. One, it, a lot of that has to do with good company. So thank you for that. But two, when you go to a place that's that amazing and yes, you miss out on your one, two, and three,

but when you saw 40 of number four, you saw five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and your list goes down to like 862. You saw, you know, a cockroach that just blew your mind. You know, there's heights and needles were just wild looking. Yeah. Um, the, the amount of stuff that I saw that was, that had a huge impact on me and had me, you know, buying new books for my shelf was, you know, it was a big deal for me. So that was, it was an incredible trip to, to strike out, so to speak, and still just like knock it out of the park. Like it was just amazing. For sure. And I, you know, it's definitely going to bring me back there too. That's, that's the main thing is that there's so many more things to see and to find.

And the bird life, man, that was so diverse. So many birds. Like I was just, yeah, I saw many more species of bird than we saw reptile. You know, it's kind of like, and that's the thing. If you're excited about just about anything. And the mammals were very cool. Those rock wallabies and the flinders and just some really cool stuff so yeah i think and and having somebody like-minded that's you know happy to stop

and look at birds or look at bugs or look at whatever you know just to get excited or geology or whatever yeah some of those that gap the the gap that had just the crazy rocks and it's allowy yeah yeah insane allowee gap was was an incredible place i i definitely need to go back there and i did not go up to the gamins with the family you know that just was that's a long haul that's a long haul and that is a little more remote you know dedicated herping like you gotta like i'd love to go back to spruce lucky track but that is not for the faint of heart. Oh, no.

It's a rough drive. That's true for people who really want to see a WOMA in that part of the country. Right. And I mean, in retrospect, maybe, you know, we spend a night in the tent out there and, you know, stay in the area for a little longer and, you know, spend more time looking. But I can't imagine that was going to be a nice place to be in the day. Like, no, that was more of a, we did it right. We did what we did, what we intended to do. We were looking for Morelia.

We didn't find the Morelia. So it's not like we could justify, you know, we're just going to give up and go look for Womas like that. It wasn't, that wasn't the goal. Right. Exactly. And I'm glad we didn't. Cause it was, it was amazing.

The night sky down there, right? Like the gamins I've never seen. It's equal. And that was nice too, to just sit and look at the stars and, you know, ponder life, whatever, you know, it was cool. Yeah. Yeah. The magical place for sure. You know, they're going back to music and pondering and, and then bringing in pondering life. We were listening to modest mouses,

ocean breeds salty as we were cruising through. I think we were on our way down through Wyala. Yeah. And there's the final, the final phrase of that song is you lace, you wasted life. Why wouldn't you waste the afterlife? Yeah. And you know, I had to stop after that and just kind of have a dad moment and talk to my family about that and said, you know, um, I think that's a real important thing, whatever you do in life. I think it's important that, you know, whether you believe there's anything after this life or not, if you don't make the most of this, know how do you how dare you expect that there could

be anything better afterwards like you've got to make the most of what we have and taking family on a trip like that and where you really are maximizing time together as a family appreciating appreciating nature for what it is passing on that passion and love for all things nature to the next generation so that there's people who care enough that conservation efforts will mean something. You know, in a climate where everyone's so worried about, you know, Shamu and, you know, we shouldn't keep animals in cages and this and that. And the reality is, is, yeah, you know what? I probably killed in cages and this and that and the reality is is yeah you

know what i probably killed too many garter snakes growing up um unintentionally every time and i was devastated when it happened but i would not be who i am today without those experiences and right you know and whether that's seeing shamu in sea world or seeing a rhinoceros in a zoo or, you know, seeing the first Burmese python behind, you know, thick glass at a, you know, at a zoo or whatever it is. Like I said, I think, you know, life is this linear journey and we can't be at the end of the journey and judge too harshly those at the beginning of the journey because they are our future. And someday if we treat them with respect, maybe help guide them so they can take those judge too harshly those at the beginning of the journey because they are our future and someday if we treat them with respect maybe help guide them so they can take those steps through that

that spectrum and get to this side where they're more holistic and understand the bigger picture then we've got people who can be on our side in in fighting to save what we're so passionate about right um you know it was it was interesting to see my wife who's not big on reptiles but she's huge on animals she loved the the mammals she thought she'd water buffalo and kakadu you know that was like one of her top things aside from playing with kozi the the Komodo dragon with Matt. That was one of the big highlights for her, but she, she, you could hear her voice almost cracking as we were driving in Western Australia and there's signs talking about, you know, the cane toads and don't bring them into Western Australia and it's quarantine

zones. And you think finally, we're going to get away from these, you know, damn toads and the biomass of toads on those roads in Western Australia around Kununurra was as bad as Queensland. And you just drive and you just see how many thousands of toads you see in a night, on nights that just seem like they're perfect and you should see tons of other stuff. And you just are hardly seeing any native frogs, hardly any native reptiles, hardly any. And it's just heartbreaking. And to see, to hear my wife say, you know, how is, how are there this many and you know, what would this be like if they weren't here anymore? And you know,

I talked to Grant husband and he was telling me a little bit about, you know, him and I went herping with my daughter in the rainforest. The other story I want to share with you. And he was telling us that, you know, he, that he was up in, uh, the top end before the cane toads got up there to cackle and stuff. And it's just hard to go there now and look at it and imagine that it, you know, it wasn't that long ago that they weren't there yeah and it's just devastating and we need people who are passionate about it people who can get down there and see australia for what it is today and try to save you know

what we can and hopefully have some successful reintroductions it was really cool to see western quolls and in uh um uh, um, the Flinders ranges. And I didn't know this Justin, but they, they did an introduction effort in 2023 into the gamins because it was around, uh, Wilpena area. I mean, we found three of them when we were in Wilpena, you know, so that was really neat, those quolls, um, and to see that success story when so many of those stories end in with radio trackers in in raptor bellies you know that's right but to see that it's worked so well that they've extended that up to the next mountain set of mountain ranges farther north was was really cool so that's awesome there's some successes out there. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the thing.

I mean, you mentioned the rising generation. I hear too much like, oh, kids these days, and they just bagging on the upcoming generation. And, you know, sure, there's some things that they're doing differently than we did. And there's more challenges that they have that we didn't have at that age, you know. And so I think, you know, to, to have that negative attitude is really going to impact our lives as well. And it's going to make things worse, you know, for everybody if we don't foster that upcoming generation. Cause like you said, I, I made plenty of mistakes coming up, you know, and I still make stupid mistakes. You know, I, how can I expect the

upcoming generation to be at the same level where I've done this for 30, 40 years now? So, you know, you just got to have some patience and some understanding or at least remembering that you were in the same boat at some point. And how much those mentors and how much those people meant that, you know, took the time to talk to you or to, you know, talk to you on the phone or email you or even go herping with you, you know, that times that I spent with just some people that I never would have thought I would have been able to herp with, you know, when I was first starting kind of in the herpetoculture area. Just fantastic. So, yeah, I think it's important that we continue to foster the people behind us. But yeah, I can only imagine how cool that would have been to go before the cane toads.

Because, you know, you were talking about Kununur and I was thinking, did I see cane toads in Kununur? And I'm like, oh, yeah, I did. They were everywhere, you know. And you think, like you said, you hurt kind of more by listening a lot of times than by seeing you know first especially at night you know or you're just walking around with a headlamp you only see what's right in front of you but you'll hear something and you're like it's another cane toad you know that's the worst thing it's like you're thinking you're gonna see something cool and it's a cane toad but yeah i guess that's the way it goes yeah it's really interesting to see

to have talked to you about your experience and And then I was there just like say a couple of weeks after you. Yeah. And we couldn't have had, I think a more different experience. The last two and a half to three weeks, the last two and a half weeks of our trip, it rained almost every single day. Wow. And you know, you know, our second night in Kununurra, the family was pretty tuckered out. We, you know, I'd seen my third DOR blackhead that night. Gosh dang. Right? And being a blackhead guy, and I had yet to see a live one at that point.

And I was just gutted because it's this beautiful, you know, maybe yearling on the road and didn't look like it was hit when I got out. Had its head just schmucked. And, you know, that was really heartbreaking, but we had just found an olive python. And that was my first. You had no shortage of those. How many olive pythons do you think you saw on that trip?

I think we found nine olive pythons. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. I i mean we were just about went and bought a broom so i can start sweeping them off the road you know they're just everywhere yeah um well that's you know that's kind of what i'm getting to is we saw the first one and then we saw the blackhead and then we and then it just it was like midnight one o'clock in the morning and the family's like kind of tuckered and i'm like you know it's a long day because we had just driven we had just drove all the way from katherine out there yeah and the night before we were like in um uh your mcmick you know area and the night before so in in one day we went from your mcmick down through katherine all the

way out to kunanura yeah hunted that whole region down near Lake Argyle. And so I'm like, you know, let's get him back to the resort. Yeah. Then tucked in. But I was still wired after seeing that blackhead, even though it was DOR, and then seeing my first olive. So I tuck him in and I go for a drive. And that's when I found that one with the big bolus in it. Found a huge, I shouldn't say huge olive, but a decent size olive with a big bolus in it.

Yeah. in it found a huge she's a huge olive a decent size olive with a big bolus in it yeah um and it was it had that very lethargic you know post brutal meal kind of like i don't know if i'm going to digest this or just die kind of a i was worried that it was dead initially and it was right on the road where i couldn't really i had to drive like right into the ditch to get around it kind of thing. So I went up there and I was like looking at it, photographed it and put my shoe up beside it to, it never once moved aside from the occasional tongue, tongue flick. Um, and so I figured, well, I'll come check on it in a little bit. And I drove for a little ways and found, um, I think three more olives in the rain.

You know, it's drizzling rain the whole time. If you found three more olives and, uh, and then I come back to where that one was and it was gone and I'm like, good. Cause there was a chain link fence there. And I could just imagine it trying to get through the chain link fence. It had ridges and it had gashes where the, where whatever it was fighting was like scraped against rock or a bit through or like it was it was really beat up yeah so i was worried about it so i went

back to check on it and that's when i think i sent you the photo but that's when i found a juvenile or really young uh freshy crocodile in the middle of the road and it was walking like a gila monster you know and just kind of doing the whole waddle thing straight away from me and so i couldn't see its profile i couldn't see the long pointed tail i just see this thing like is it what kind of a monitor is that like it's it's at night and everything about it yeah it was just a freshie on the road and uh that was only maybe 20 meters or so from where the olive was so um with the kind of either would have been a fresh year or maybe one of those fruit bats it was

that same size so yeah crazy yeah it was really neat really neat but um there is one other story i gotta tell you because i alluded to it and that's my uh when my daughter and i met up with grant husband yeah in the atherton tablelands and we went to do some spotlighting for geckos right yeah so we had you know there was 11 different species of python that we could have seen on the trip and we ended up finding eight of them wow that felt pretty good right that is almost one we found 18 pythons oh my god eight different taxa so you you saw olives and the gamins or flinders ranges carpet yeah we saw that we saw the water python water python we saw um he's got a blackhead right so we got some blackheads yeah um ended up finding

a scrubby up in Cape Tribulation. Cool. Nice water and a pouring rain crossing the road. We've got the children's in Western Australia. Found a spotted. Oh yeah. Coastal carpet down in the South central part of Queensland. We weren't too far from New south wales okay and then uh found yeah so that's all yeah yeah you found that that's crazy we ended up seeing a huge a huge uh carpet

in the mountains uh just north of uh brisbane and it was just really cool to see this big thing. And it had a kind of a small head on it. You know, it didn't have that macrocephalic. Yeah. Like it didn't look like an old snake, like this thing I would guess would have another 20, 30 years to it and could just end up being a monster. It was already,

you know, one of the biggest really I've ever seen. And it just looked young. It looked like it was a five-year-old snake. It did not look like this thing was on the tail end of life because that was really cool to see especially compared to that flinders animal where every scale looked like it was almost glued on right like it's yeah it reminded me of a of a heloderma right almost like osteoderms on every scale on the head rather than scales you know that's cool yeah that was fun but yeah we

were up in uh atherton tablelands area and just pouring pouring rain and you know since the cyclone last year uh well now we're in 2025 but the 2023 cyclone that went through that area just destroyed the roads through the daintry and cape tribulation so the 23 kilometers or whatever to get across the ferry from cape trib took us like an hour and 40 minutes oh wow and we were out there in the pouring rain and it's pretty sketchy when those creeks are getting up to the top of the river when it's already the roads have already been washed away there's single lane there's connex boxes to hold back the landslides and you're driving and it just drops straight off into the ocean it just poured rain right it was pretty sketchy yeah um but we

get up to the athlin table ones and we meet with grant he says i got a spot let's go and so we went out to spotlight and it's just pouring rain and i i would did not know necessarily what to expect aside from we were going to get wet and probably see some geckos. And so we get out on the trail and we start hiking along and we get about, I don't know, it seems like it was a while into the trip, maybe 20, 30 minutes into the hike. And he says, oh, you know, if you see any heart shaped leaves, just be careful. You don't touch them. Uh, you know, it's the Australian steam trees. And, um, I was like, yep. Yeah. I'm aware of those, but thanks. And I hadn't thought to tell my daughter about it and she's got good footwear

on, but she's, she's wearing shorts and, um, and neither one of us had an umbrella, but of course, Grant from the area knows what to expect. And he's, you know, they're got his umbrella on and he's you know there got his umbrella on and he's staying relatively dry and we're just swimming you know if i jumped in a pool i wouldn't have been any more wet than we were you know walking down that trail yeah um and so we walk a little bit farther and he says uh he says and just just be keep an eye on each other and just make sure you don't end up with any leeches on your face. You don't want them to get into your eyes.

And I'm like, wait, I've grown up with leeches and ponds and, you know, I've had lots of leeches on me in my life, you know, chasing garter snakes and stuff and Nerodia. But I'm like, we are not standing in water. It's like the rain, like it's like, what's going on? And he says, Oh, that's right. You guys don't have terrestrial leeches in the U S terrestrial leeches. They're just on the edges of plants and on the ground and whatever. And they're just all over the place. And he says like this one here, and he's got one on his hand

and one on his arm and he's like brushing them off. And I'm like looking at all of a sudden, I've got them all over. And I didn't, you know, had no idea. They're so insidious. Like you don't even notice them being on you. It's crazy. And then I notice on my glasses and I can barely see cause I've got a headlamp on. So I don't have a cap covering and of course wearing glasses in the pouring rain sucks. Right. Yeah.

So, and I just noticed that I, this one isn't, you know, kind of clean it off and I pull it off and I got a big leech across my glasses. Oh God. Grant's like, Hey, let's do eye checks. And, you know, he's like shining lights in my eyes and I pull it off and I got a big leech across my glasses. Oh, go. It's like, Hey, let's do eye checks. And you know, he's like shining lights in my eyes and I'm shining in his.

And he says, if they get in your eyes, you know, just let them feed and fall out. You don't want to try to pull them out. Cause it can damage your eye. And I just, we don't get leeches in our eyes to start off with,

you know, the whole time. I'm like looking over at my 17 year old daughter going, you know, if that was my wife, we'd have been done. The second you mentioned leeches, we would immediately turn around. I mean, we were already a mile and a half down this trail probably. Right. Like he's like, I look at my daughter and I said, are you good with this?

Can we, I mean, we've got a ways to go to get back to the car anyways. Do we keep looking for geckos or do we turn around? I'm like, I do not want this to be a miserable experience for you. she says no i really want to see geckos so you know real proud dad moment that she's up with that um that's cool so yeah pouring rain and we look down and there's every few steps you look down you got a dozen leeches on your shoes and two or three on your ankles and um the next time we did an eye check, I had one on the side of my nose. Um, yeah, I wasn't winning any points with my, with my daughter, but she was certainly winning points with me. Cause she just was so anxious to see a carphidaculis or something like she just won.

I was showing her pictures. I was like, yeah, we're going to find one. You know, we're going to get out there. We're going to, uh, we're going to do do good here and so we're still not seeing anything lots of cool frogs you know the what is the green-eyed frogs and the white-lipped tree frogs and again just so many different cool tree frogs as we're going through this forest and they've got the the wait a while's oh i hate this right yeah they're curving hooks on them uh-huh and they're you know they're they would catch grant's umbrella and he's walking ahead of us and the umbrella would come back and like hit me in the shoulder hit me in the face you know yeah waiting waiting sees or wait a while or whatever they're called and like peel

it off his umbrella and then we'd walk again and we go up a little bit farther and all of a sudden i hear this panic in my daughter's voice and she doesn't scream she's not crying but i can hear she's like it's got my eye it's on my eye no and i shine my light and she's got one of those vines on the inside of her eyelid across her top eyelid no her eyes it's she's holding her her hand in front of her face and her eyelids are pulling through her fingers oh no and i'm like grabbing this i'm trying to give her some push it back towards her to see if there's a little bit of space there and i'm like i we can't see well enough to like you're gonna have to grab it with your hand and pull it off your own eyelids like you've just got to feel it and make sure it's not going to damage your eye

and just get it off yeah and uh and so she was able to pull that off and her eye was all red and I didn't know if it actually cut into her eye or what the situation was. And I said, look, we're, we're away from the car still. Um, we'll just keep an eye on it. We'll, you know, when we get back to the car, we'll reassess. And if we have to go to urgent care, you know, find a hospital somewhere or something, we, we do that. Like. Don't worry, we'll figure this out. The good thing is I've always told my kids is when things go sideways, that's the magic of stories. That's where stories happen. We've talked a lot so far in this discussion about when you have those incredible finds, finding the snake from the cover of a book.

Those things definitely are good stories. But the best stories are, I almost died, right? It's like, did you die? Those are the best campfire stories to share. And so I was telling her, hey, when we get out of this, you're at least going to have a story that none of your friends will be able to talk. How many of them have been hiking through one of the oldest rainforests in the world and had the rainforest try to kill them and thousands of leeches yeah and so we get we get all the way back to the parking lot and we're getting in the vehicle and grant says i i don't know if you guys are up for it but there's one other place we can check

because we have we hadn't seen a single gecko and then we thought kept thinking the rain is gonna lighten up and it was just down in hours of just coming down yeah and every time we saw an eye shine it was another huntsman spider you know you know and we're just we're just striking out on the geckos um and so i i look at her and i said i said i know you want to go back we can we can go back no no problem she said no i I know you want to go back. We can, we can go back. No, no problem. And she said, no, I want to, I want to go to the other spot. Let's do it. And her eye at that point had calmed down a little bit. You could see some, some blood where it had cut on the outside of her eyelid, but her eye itself looked fine. And I was like, you know, you know,

whether she's back at the hotel or out there in the rainforest is not going to make a difference. And if she wants to go, let's do it. And so I was so proud of her. I mean, she's, she's like, the hotel or out there in the rainforest is not going to make a difference and if she wants to go let's do it and so i was so proud of her i mean she's truly she's like let's go look yeah so yeah we went up quite a ways to another place and hiked out and um some more frogs and a lot more leeches but we did not see either we did not see a single reptile oh man but yeah it was just bad luck and you know even in the rain i know you can find them but it was it was really coming down so yeah well and they're hard to find anyway i mean you know like well i guess the the uh saltuarius blend in so nicely you know yeah That's a trick. But yeah, that's that's rough.

That was that was my first. I think that was my first reptile or second reptile. Because we saw I saw some little skinks. But on my first trip, I walked around this lake the whole way around the lake up in the table lands. And I saw one leaf tail gecko and it didn't have a tail it was tail i'm like you lied to me you're not a leaf-tailed you're a no-tailed gecko is that one of the crater lakes there yep yeah yeah that was cool and i and i mean i i seriously probably took three hours to go around it because i was like stopping every few seconds looking around looking at every tree thinking i'm gonna see a carpet or

a scrub or something but i was pretty stoked to see that gecko but i didn't see any scrubs or carpets around the lake but it was it was cool well despite the the fun with the leeches my wife when we left cape tribulation she said what would it take for us to live down here oh man that's the magic words that was absolutely magic words. So I think, you know, that's, that's going to be the goal over the next few years is to change, you know, we've got too many animals to, to do anything immediately. Yeah. My daughter graduates from high school here in a few months and then that kind of changes

life for the foreseeable, but we're going to start looking and, um, you know, can't live there full time, but it probably spent four plus months every year down there, you know, start doing that hopefully starting in the next couple of years. So, um, yeah, I can't say enough about how amazing, you know, some of those places are, but my wife immediately was just blown away with the Daintree and Cape Tribulation and waking up. We saw a dozen plus stingrays every morning basking as the waves were coming over them. And, um, you know, the huge blue lobsters that had been killed the night before were washing up

and, um, you know, just everything about it, that big scrubby and the huge tree frogs and, um, yeah, just everything about it, that big scrubby and the huge tree frogs and yeah, yeah. Just everything about the place. It just ticked every one of my wife's boxes. And if I, you know, I, I absolutely would love to live in Australia. The Daintree would not be my top place. I would love to be where it's a little bit drier, but man, I can certainly drive to anywhere from there, anywhere from there, you know, just getting to Australia is a problem, but Cape Trib is, is a anywhere from there. Yeah. Anywhere from there, you know, just getting to Australia is a problem.

But Cape Trib is a truly magical place, right? For sure. Yeah. Incredible. There's just so many. That's the hard thing would be to choose where to live. You know, I don't know where I would live if I, I guess maybe in the center. So I'm, you know, close to everywhere.

Yeah. Such a great place. Well, I'm trying to think if there's anything that any cons that I I guess the only thing like is if, you know, things aren't planned right. You know, you might have some issues or if you're if you don't if you're just being selfish about, like I have been in the past, then, you know, that can be problematic. But otherwise, I think you're right. There's more pros than cons to herping with family. And it's a, but it is a good mix to throw in the herp trip with buddies or a solo herp trip. You know, it was, it was kind of interesting, like being on my own and, you know, having to consider the fact that there was nobody to help me if I

got a flat tire or if I was in some sketchy thing and, and like nobody to go for help while I stayed with the car or whatever, you know, so those kinds of things need to be considered as well. And I'm maybe a little more of a risk taker when I'm with a group or, or, or less of a risk taker in some ways, you know, where like, no, let's, let's go, let's call it a night or, you know, whatever, but yeah, it's, it's a definitely a balance and there's a lot of different things for different trips, but. Yeah. You know, I remember you guys did a,

an episode where you talked about night driving versus hiking animals, you know, and I think they're just two different tools. And I think herping with family and herping solo again are just two different experiences i don't i really don't i think it's kind of an unfair question to say what's better because you know i i go herping with my family especially on an adventure like that and i came back and everyone who talks to me is going to be sick of hearing the same stories and hearing these stories for probably the next decade. Right. Um,

it was just absolutely magical and incredible spirit experience, but I did not get the same recharge. Uh, like my, you know, I go out solo and I can just take it all in. That's how I charge my batteries. Like that's how I can put up with conference calls and,

you know, stressful client situations and the day to day and calls and, you know, stressful client situations and the day-to-day and dealing with, you know, the drama of social media. And, you know, I've just got to get out in the wild and I don't get the same recharge going with family. It's a different high. It's a different experience. I still need my solo time. You know, I need to go back and be in my cave for a bit. And when I come out of that, I'm, you know, I need, I need to go back and be in my cave for a bit. Um, and when I come out of that, I'm, I'm, you know, back to my good old self. But, um, if I, if I had to choose one

or the other, I would still choose the family. There's just, it's incredible to see, you know, to bring it full circle, to see their faces light up when they see something for the first time, you know? And for me, us herping had really, before my son was born for the first time, you know? And for me, U.S. herping had really, before my son was born, the first time I went to Australia, um, was the year, a year or two before he was born. He's six now turning seven here in a couple of weeks. Um, but I kind of had lost a lot of my passion for herping. I'd found every species in California, but one, uh, every species in Arizona, but two, every species in New Mexico, uh, but one, every species in West Texas. Um, you know, I just, I was kind of going through and ticking boxes and, you know, it's, it's decades of

that just being my passion and nothing held me back. And I just was herping all the time. And, um, but I just kind of felt at one point I lost my hard drive and lost over 10 years, 15 years of field notes and all my photos. And, and basically I started, I just kind of stepped away from it all. And I wasn't keeping it any animals at the time and got into racing cars and doing some other stuff and just kind of stepped away from that world. And I would still spend my from at all and i wasn't keeping it any animals at the time and got into racing cars and doing some other stuff and just kind of stepped away from that world and i would still spend my vacation time going out to like the sky islands but i fell in love with kodamundi and different animals and really started to look at the world from a not specifically a reptile through reptile lenses

you know um but then when i went to australia it was like i felt like the five-year-old me the first time he saw like a chawan hook no snake and didn't know if it was a heterodon or guillopion or like i had no idea what this animal was yeah i kept looking at the books and i've turned snout it's got this it's got that it doesn't look exactly like this picture and you know and i feel that way as i'm about to turn 50 years old, every time I get into that country, just an amazing feeling. And I came back and people are like, Hey, let's go, let's go her Arizona in the spring. I'm like, I, it just literally doesn't do anything for me.

And I was just kind of burned out on us herping when my son was born. And the first time, you know, the first couple of times we went out together and saw stuff and, you know, in our backyard, we've got some incredible bullfrogs and we've got coral snakes that we see frequently in our front yard and we see cotton mouths and copperheads and just seeing that kid as a two-year-old and three-year-old lighting up. And when he was four, he caught the biggest bullfrog I've ever seen in the backyard. And, you know,

the look on his face, just staring at this thing, like he just couldn't believe that that even existed. Um, and now it's like, I want to go and experience it all over again, through his eyes. Like I love going back out to California and, and I can't wait for him to find his first Rosie. And, uh, I can't wait for him to see his first tri-color in the wild. And, you know, and, and so it's re, I've got a whole new life, you know, looking through his eyes. I had a little bit of that with my daughter, but her focus is really on the geckos and it's more of a husbandry thing.

Whereas him and I, we do toad ventures most nights and we go and we got a pond in our backyard and we go and walk around that with our headlamps most nights and see what we can see. And there's, you know, five or six different species of frogs and we find most of them most nights. And we've got three Nerodia back there and finding those and just, you know,

those experiences seeing buttermilk racers in the front yard. And yeah, it's really kind of that Huck Finn lifestyle that my father gave me living up in Canada. But for me, it was fishing. It was hunting. It was that. And for him, it's, you know, frogging and snaking and, you know, seeing the toads everywhere. So I'm excited for the future. I, I used to be pretty pessimistic about the upcoming generations and I'm, I feel more and more, um, that it, that we've got a responsibility to share our passions and we really need to

jumpstart these, this next generation and get them through those first few ego driven, you know, find an animal at any cost, grab it. As soon as you see it, tear bark off trees, we've got to get them through those phases and we got to get them to where they can appreciate the animals for what they are and where they truly have a passion for nature around them. And I think it, it, it can only give them a sense of fulfillment they'll have in their life that

they can't find any other way. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've really enjoyed. So speaking of the upcoming generation, like I look at somebody like Dustin Grahn, you know, who I've herped with a few times, we've been able to herp with him and he's just a great herper. Like he's just, you know, years, years ahead of his time, I guess he, you know, and so it's, it's been really cool to be invigorated by him because he's so excited and passionate and he's kind of doing the same thing. Like I got to find all the species in my state

and that kind of, I mean, I, I had kind of neglected my own state. You know, I, I was only interested in deserts. I was only interested in desert herbs, you know, head down to St. George. And that was about my, that was the best thing I could do or down Canyon lands or whatever. And then, um, you know, during COVID and getting together with Rob and doing some trips with him and thinking, man, I don't know my backyard as well as I should know it. You know, I need to spend more time herping in Utah. And I just spent all my focus and all my drive and determination on getting over to Australia and getting another trip over there and saving up all

my time to go herp there. And, and, uh, I've really neglected my backyard. So I, it was nice to kind of refocus and get, you know, have that opportunity, whether I wanted it or not, you know, to, to hurt more locally and see, see more stuff in my own state. And that's been really cool. Really. Yeah. Yeah. And you really live in the most incredible state for herping, right? Like there's let's keep that between. No, no. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's maybe not the most productive. It reminds me, like I said, it reminds me in a lot of ways of South Australia. It's the grandeur, like before we moved to Texas, my wife and I, cause we spent a lot of time, we were living in Southern California at the time and we knew we were going to miss

the American Southwest. And so we took a five day trip and we hit all the national parks in California, Arizona, and Utah in five days. Wow. Ridiculous. Yeah. It was two speeding tickets. It was a lot of chaos. Yeah. Um, but I had to go see my yellow headed collared lizards in the red canyons. You know, I had to go and show her newspaper rock. I had to go see Bryce Canyon where, you know, my my family was some of the original settlers in that area and go see those red rocks there. And Utah is just full of just some of the most amazing habitat and just incredible to just walk through. And even if you don't see anything, it's just some of the most beautiful country that in Arizona are just ridiculous, but then it does have the diversity of wildlife. You know, you've got,

especially that St. George area is really neat where you've got the Mojave kind of bleeding into the great basin and the Sonoran deserts now kind of clash right there. And you end up with just a really incredible diversity in that, you know, some of my earliest memories of herping is with my dad and probably 1983, 84 in St. George. And we'd go climb in those rocks. And I remember finding a leutosis and um and it was just the the buckskin yeah with almost red with the black blotches on with almost bordered in red you know you get one of those really incredible ones and i remember seeing that and my dad was afraid of snakes the

first time i ever got grounded was for bringing a garter snake oh really and he was he was not happy when i got interested in snakes. And, and when we started, when he finally let me have a Burmese Python and then get a ball Python, and then I got a red tail green rat snake, and then I got colored lizards and I started having this collection. And then he started taking me out to find stuff. And, and we went on these trips down to to moab and saint george but the trip that we found that leptosis and i remember him looking at that and he's like snakes are incredible i'm like they are aren't they and and that was the beginning and we spent the next 15 years herping together and i mean i remember graduation you know, through my high school graduation, through the cap up in the air and before it hit the ground, him and I were in the car and all my friends were at parties and him and I went to Death Valley and we slept on the sand dunes at three o'clock in the morning. It's cool. It's up there. And I mean, it was, I think that we just have a responsibility to give those kinds of experiences

to the next generation, whether it's our kids, somebody else's kids, you know, we can't, it's, we're losing too many of our mentors, right? We're at the age where so many of the people who are influential in our lives are gone. And someone just asked me to write a story of kind of some of my memories of lloyd lemke because he was a big influence in my life and uh you know and i shared the story and really my passion for australia herpes comes from my dad and i were up there we had collected an aneurysmic rosy boa the first one that went into the snow rosy project first rosies and we were up there and we showed lloyd this anathuristic boa and he was just

blown away that there's this blue snake, like just, you know, that was really cool. And as we were about to leave, there was a honk and the dogs are barking and he says, Oh, you're going to want to stick around for this. And two guys come in and the, I had no idea who the guys were at the time and they're talking and, and they're just sharing all these stories and they're talking about animals I'd never heard of. They're talking about places I didn't even know

existed. And, you know, I was kind of a cocky kid. I'm probably now just a cocky old guy, but I thought I knew it all. I thought I'd seen it all. I thought I'd, you know, I mean, I was collecting stuff for, for Lloyd, for fresh blood, for some of his projects and stuff. We were going all over the U.S. finding stuff for him. And I just kind of thought I was the top of the pile. And these guys were talking and it just was so humbling and fascinating to hear them talk. And then one guy opens up a bag and he hands this plastic, you know, salad takeout container type thing.

Hands two of them to lloyd and lloyd immediately hands one to me and we always played this game where he's like hey you know what's this what's this and see if i knew what all the stuff was and uh i had no clue what this animal was i mean it it it was like i was sure it was a colubrid but i but it was like nothing i'd ever seen before. And I was kind of talking through this out loud saying this stuff. And these guys have these big, silly grins on their faces. I'm talking, I'm like, I have no idea what it is. And it had these orangish bands on a creamy, you know, body with black eyebrows.

Right. Yeah. It was a moment. Yeah. And these guys talk about it. And, um, you know, and that, that, that story didn't really have a whole lot of impact. I didn't understand who they were. Shouldn't say it didn't have a lot of impact. It immediately had impact. I mean, I no longer wanted to just see rattlesnakes and kingsnakes. I wanted to see these crazy pythons in the wild.

And that was the beginning. Right. This is late 80s, early 90s. that was the beginning right this is late 80s early 90s that was the beginning of my passion for australia and it wasn't it was a long time later before i finally got down there yeah um but you know come to find out that was don hamper with one of the first clutches of one was that was ever produced in ever you know australia or the u.s selling a pair it's the largest check i'd ever seen written at the time by a few zeros too was incredible and the other guy was casey casey wow and so i seem to meet casey a young younger casey lazik and a younger don hamper and uh lloyd and my dad was there and i think back on that and now casey and i are the only two who are still with us yeah and um it's tough that you take the amount of experience and knowledge and passion that these guys had and it's just gone.

Yeah. And, you know, it's really important. I think that we hand that down and we stop gatekeeping. I think most of us, as we get older, we aren't gatekeeping too much. We're sharing as much as we can, but it's really easy to, you know, you get told that you don't know what you're talking about by someone who's got three years of experience keeping leopard geckos. It's hard to still be open and inviting and, and, you know, I'm not good at sharing my collection with people. No one,

no one really sees it. It's my passion. It's, it's not as new for strangers to see and um but i think i think it's important that we inspire that passion in the next generation yeah and i i wish more i i guess there is kind of a good collection of like like this bartlett book you know searching for reptiles in the wild and, um, the stocking, the plume serpent, another cool, you know, uh, a lot of the books that these guys are writing. I've always encouraged Casey to write a book because his stories can just like fill my imagination with the cool stuff he's seen.

To not have that down on papers is a crime against humanity yeah it is and and i think uh hopefully somebody will talk him into it at some point but yeah just these people that have this just great wealth of knowledge and and i mean i i used like like i think i've told this story before but uh reading the Stalking the Plume Serpent book and seeing the chapter on green tree pythons and then finding myself like unexpectedly in Iron Range on my first trip over there. And then just remembering, oh, this is how they look for it. I said, hey, let's try this out. And it worked. And we found a green tree python, you know, it's like, oh man, these, you know, this, it really works. This knowledge is really important. And, you know, and, and I mean,

you can find that book for, you know, 15 bucks on Amazon or something. And it's, you know, I don't know, just so much information. And he was the banquet speaker at those last IHS. And I was there and he was, he had a, he was also vending his books in the other room. Dr. Means, right? Bruce Means. And we, we were, I went back there to talk to him between talks and the next talk came on and I just found myself enthralled and I just spent hours and I missed on some of

the big talks that the whole reason I went there was to hear this and this and this, but to sit at the feet of, of some of these guys who have been there, done that and been the giants that we've stepped on their shoulders to get to where we're at, um, was, is really incredible, you know, to spend time with the Craig Trumbowers of the world and, and his passion for Planet Snake tune, snake tune to spend time with Dr. Means to spend time with the likes of Tony bright down in Australia. And, and then, you know, there's just so many great people who have so much to contribute and have

contributed so much. But I think we're also selling ourselves short as we get older and realizing that we, you know, who's going to take that torch, you know, that mantles falls on who, and we can't leave it for the YouTube influencers, you know, like that's, that who realize that it's a bigger picture. Um, and, um, I don't, I don't know how we do it in a world where everyone wants their information in five to eight seconds, but, uh, yeah, we got to find a way. We've got to do it. I think, you know, the fact that you came on the podcast and told, you know, your stories, that's a great way to get that message out. You know, how exciting this is and how, you know, we even being in this for 30 plus years, you know, we still there's still a lot to learn and a lot to experience and a lot to the World or whatever, and seeing how many snakes I had no clue existed.

I know very little about a small range of snakes or lizards, and that's the stuff that I'm most passionate about. But it's nice getting together with like-minded people who have completely different interests. You know, that Herpeton conference that Alan Rapashi and Philippe put on was fantastic. You know, just for that reason, I got to meet people like Quetzal Dwyer and, you know, and, and I saw a recent video that he was on with, with the Reptalandia and just talking about the things that he's got in his cage. He knows a lot about those animals, you know, and a lot about a diversity of species. And yeah, Kessel's an amazing, amazing individual and someone that I look up to in reptilandia is kind of in our backyard. Yeah. I've only had a chance to be there a couple of times, but really incredible what he's done there and the size of those cages and to be

able to see Eastern water dragons and watch them, you know, drop out of a perch 20 feet in the air, into the water and swim up to a bank and defend their territory and everything else. And you're like, I've seen that in Australia. And it happened just like that. Like you can, you can, like, how, how do you do that? I've never seen enclosures. Yeah. That's incredible. Um, and there's some people doing some big stuff, you know, and I was really impressed when I went to like Hawk Hartley's crocodile adventure in Queensland, it was expecting that to be just a tourist trap, you know, bite, bite, chomp, chomp

crocodiles, jumping for chicken, move on. Right. move on right um but i i had had not met matt somerville before but had heard nothing but incredible things about him um and was after finding the same snake that he did i was super looking forward to meeting him in person and sharing that with him and i knew my son would get a kick out of the saltwater crocs right right seeing what he's done with that reptile collection there. And I thought reptilandia was like the top tier. Like that was it. And really from a size standpoint, I've never seen anything that's equal,

but what Matt's done in the team over at Hartley's, I also can't say enough about what they've done. They're all native plants in the cages, the actual rock structure from where they're from when you look at the agonia there you're like that's exactly what i was i mean it almost looks like you just took a box and cut out the entire habitat where it was and brought it and put it in as like it's so perfect every species that's in there is right and every rock is just right and everything about it is just right.

And while it's not the size, you know, there's only so much you can do, right? Like nobody has unlimited funds. Yeah. I, you know, maybe in my lifetime, someone will, the quality of cages of enclosures that Hartley's has done in the size of enclosures that Ketzel's done, you know, that would be ridiculous, but actually that would be being in the wild. Like that's what Australia is, right? Yeah, exactly. And I, I was reminded too of that story, you know,

kind of along the same lines of sitting and watching when we saw those agurnia, the, the Gidgees out in South Australia and just sitting and watching. And, and and like i was right like okay they're not going to come out or whatever you're like you just kind of sat there and spotted one you know yeah trying to get close to get pictures and there was another one and you know all of a sudden they're coming out because the little sun broke through or whatever yeah following that sit and wait strategy even though i'm trying to duplicate that with my family and it was pouring rain the whole way we drove up to that same area. Yeah.

And then we hiked up there and the rain stopped for a bit. And I'm like, if the sun will just peek out because it wasn't cold like when you and I went. Yeah, it was warm, but it was just rain, rain, rain. And so I was like, all we need is just a little bit of a break. If we can just see some blue sky for for just five minutes we'll see them and we got out there and i went and looked in the same crevice and there was one not two in that crevice that we saw him in yeah likely the same one of the same animals right um and then just a gorgeous one the sun did come out when we're up at the top and there was this gorgeous one that just let me sit there for like 30 minutes the family's hiking up and down all over the place

and finding all these other dragons yeah i. I just was just blown away. Just spending time with this one animal and yeah. Yeah. Really, really cool area. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And also I'm on that same trip herping with Sean Scott. Yeah. Yeah. Just, you know, he's a candidate and just knew like we'd pick up these weird skinks little brown skinks and he's like oh that's that species and you're like oh that saved me about three hours in my guidebook trying to figure out what the heck that was you know

and like finding these weird larista with only back legs and you know all sorts of crazy legs and two toes and nothing in the front and just incredibly bright yellow bellies like just awesome on this trip and it was hot where we when you and i went they were cold and kind of chilling out yeah we should see them in the heat and how quickly they blast through that sand i imagine like yeah they were fast enough when they were cold oh yeah like it was wild they were just going going going and my son was just giggling and it was it was really incredible to see those larista and how quickly they just fly through but yeah once you see you know the first 10 brown skinks and can't identify them what's the next 15 going to be like it's right it's amazing the diversity of skinks yeah and to have somebody that's interested in like in studying that and knows you know just

right off right off the you know the dot that's that's really fun and his passion for it right like he had that same passion for these little brown things he's like oh look at this it's got these two toes and look at that here and look at this and you know and i'm like i most people struck who consider themselves python people struggle to have that kind of passion for something as different as a blackhead versus a carpet Python. And here he is with these tiny little brown skinks. And you could just tell. But that passion was infectious. Like you got excited about it because he was excited about it.

And I think that's kind of the, you know, bringing that back to the topic is that's how we encourage the next generation is our passion and our excitement. And, you know, what we put out there is kind of what's going to be there for them to. Absolutely. And, you know, I don't, I don't know if you've seen it. I'm sure you're aware of it, but Steve Crawford's lectures that he did is, is video series, the education on, on that. I, I just feel like, and I've recommended to every person I've sold a Morelia to that was their first one. I was like, you've got to go check out this educational series. Um, just really brilliantly done. Um, and,

and one of those things that that's something that's going to last, that's going to have impact on the next generation of keepers, not necessarily, you know, the same kind of passion we're talking about for the wild, but that's what hit where his passion is. And he's, he's, you know, he's created an avenue to be able to give that to the next generation. And, you know, he, he just opened his, his pet store down there. Right. And we were there the week before. And so I got to get a tour of that. It was really neat, again, to see someone who's got incredible passion and to see their dream coming together. I wish him the best there.

He sent me a little picture last night of his book section, and I had a few of my books. I'm like, oh, yeah. He was able to find some. He Cause he was talking to me about, and it's like shipping is such a headache to try to get books to Australia. There's no cheap way to do it. So books out of Australia. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just right. And so, yeah, he was able to find somebody in Australia that had them. So that was good. Oh, nice. But yeah,

I'm excited for him. I'm excited to go check out his shop. So hopefully I can get back there soon to, to see it in action. I, I'm excited for him. I'm excited to go check out his shop. So hopefully I can get back there soon to see it in action. I spent more on books this last Australia trip than I spent total, I think, for my first Australia trip. I filled an entire. Yeah, I came back with tons of books. Nice. Yeah.

You know, I just I just added, what, 12 feet of bookshelf on the top wall of my office here. And I've got a board out here. I'm adding over here. I've got two boxes on the floor here, more books. And then, you know, two full shelves back here. That's all Australia books that behind me. And yeah, I just, I'm a, I'm a sucker for books and you get down there and you see some of the incredible stuff that's more regional that, you know, it'll just never, you know, and there's, there's not enough

of a market for them here that anyone's going to care to send them across. And, and so to go down there and see them on the shelves and it's the, the frogs, the snakes, the lizards of, of this particular region and to go and grab up those books. And, um, yeah, I just couldn't help myself. My wife's like, how much are you spending on books? And I'm like, less than we're spending on food and resorts. So let's not worry about it. Yeah. It's yeah. It's, it's thank you for coming on and for all these great insights. It's been really a great episode. Thanks for having me. Much, much longer than our normal episode.

So, yeah, we might have broken the record with this one. But real quick at the end here, I wondered if, I mean, first put out your information and where people can see kind of your photos. Yeah, I'm slowly getting parrot reptiles together on Facebook and on Instagram. I've been posting some pictures from this trip. So if you're interested in any of the animals we've talked about and kind of getting a play by play, I've got up through the top end and I'm working on posts for Queensland here over the next week or two. And yeah, I think that's probably the best way to get ahold of Facebook parrot reptiles. P R E T T. Nice. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. It's been fun to see

your posts there and all the pictures and things. So that's very cool. And then lastly, any, any, uh, cool, um, things that you've seen in herpetology or herpetoculture over the last few weeks? I came across, I'll throw one out there. I came across the Instagram post from Yovo Adahowatu. I'm not sure. I just took a snapshot of it, so I wouldn't forget this. But he put out a paper, Lampropeltis alterna in West Texas. And it talks about, they, they radio track some and kind of looked at their movements and things like that. So pretty interesting. I'm excited to get

the actual article and read, I've just read the abstract, but it looks like it's cool information. Yeah. I've got the article if you need me to send it to you. Yeah. It's, it's a really good work. I'm trying to remember what it was. One of their sensors failed and they didn't have the correlation of weather with the data that they got from the animal movement. Okay. And that, to me, kind of pulled, like, took the thunder out of that paper. Because that's really what it comes down to. For those of us who spend a lot of time looking for Alterna i've got two friends that are just alterna magnets they just literally they'll text me and they're like hey we're going you want to come and if whether i make it or not

you know they go and they end up posting alterna and you see the forums and people are like oh yeah who got the first one of the year and i'm like these guys have already sent me three pictures of them you know and you guys are talking about who's going to find the first one. And these guys are already there. And yeah, I already found three of them. Yeah, it just so for me, I was super excited to see that paper. And as I'm sure they were as disappointed as us as the readers of it to see that they didn't have. I'm pretty sure that was the weather sensors that they didn't get the data for.

But yeah, that would have been the big thing because that's obviously a key component. Timing weather with movement and figuring out what's going on there is going to be really how we figure them out. Right. Yeah. The lead author is DeSantis, D-E-S-A-N-T-I-S. So yeah, if you want to look thatA-N-T-I-S. So, yeah, if you want to look that up yourselves, should be an interesting read.

But, yeah, it's too bad they didn't get the weather information in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a really good paper. Regardless, lots of good information. I love seeing papers like that. Yeah. I really wish. Right. seeing papers like that yeah really rich right the rosy boa one that ended with all those transmitters being found in in scat and whatever else every animal just got devoured and it's like yeah i would be in such a big rosy boa guy um in my earlier years it would have been really cool to have a better understanding i know when they're moving but i'd love to know where they're going why they're going there how much time they're spending there um you know they're they're pretty predictable it's pretty easy to find them but knowing what they're doing when we can't see them would be invaluable right right

like yeah melissa britain's information on aspedites talk about turning the world up on its end you know exactly yeah game changer kind of that stuff. Almost 30 feet up in trees, eating bearded dragons, you know, like they, they forgot that they weren't Morelia. Exactly. Not just one observation of that, you know, and just really cool to see that kind of information. So I'm really excited with the future with this miniaturization technology, improving to where we can do that with species like alterna and yeah you know where are we going to be 20 years from now like it'll be really cool to see the data that we can that we can get and better understanding we can have of the you know the ecological systems that we take for granted yeah it's it's too bad it's dependent on funding a lot of times because you know it really just takes a scientist who's interested in a

certain species or group or something to go out and do these natural history studies but they're just so far few and far between because of the funding issue but right i love kind of the citizen scientist aspect of that and you know being able to like you going out to your pond and recording what frogs you saw in a night or something and compiling that data. And that could be a huge deal for in the future for some, somebody. So I don't know, just those kind of things that we can kind of record and put out there. It's really valuable, I think. So, yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, you guys have anything else to add or I know we're well over two hours now, so we can call it or unless you have something cool to share.

I don't. You know, I'm certainly excited about Craig Trumbauer's Picture Office book that's getting there. And, you know, was was fortunate to help out with some of the range maps and some of the editing and getting a preview of that and i absolutely cannot wait to see that book in print that is talk about a book a long time in coming like how do we not have yeah a tome on pichuophis right you know one of the most commonly seen species in wherever they exist and part of you know everybody knows bull snakes blow snakes the gopher snakes, whatever you want to call them. You know, they're just especially in the western U.S. They're just so ubiquitous with the American Southwest.

And how do we not have that book yet? So talk about a huge undertaking. And I cannot wait to see it in print. And, you know, hope if you only buy one book this year i highly recommend uh everyone look for that one when it comes out so i'm super excited for it very cool no i'm i'm excited i've got a soft spot for pitch you office i've always loved the great basin gophers just even though they're common and you see them all the time they're such cool species Yeah, they really are. Cool. Yeah. We'll have to catch, you know, watch for that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, Jordan, for coming on and looking forward to

seeing more from you in the future and getting you back on here and down the road. So maybe after we're both 50 in Australia. Yeah, exactly. We'll have more to talk about, more stories to share. Can't wait. I've been planning pretty heavy the trip, so I'm excited. I've got some good spots for us for sure. Excellent. Excellent. I look forward to it. All right. Well, thanks, Jordan. Thanks, Rob. And we'll catch you again next time for Reptile Fighters.