Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have to say thanks to Frank for all of the help you have given me over the past 2.5 years and asked nothing in return.. When I posted about my croc with a prolapsed cloaca Frank, Jody, and JT were there to help... It was a dehydration problem that sounds simple but really isn't... at least for me it wasn't... He is doing fine now and I appreciate you folks for taking the time to help... Just recently one of my female crocs stopped eating... I feed my crocs rats or chopped rats and a female I had stopped eating for a month... I believe she would have died if not for Franks help... He said 'she is cycling, feed her medium mice and she will eat them,'the next morning my son and I put a medium mouse in the cage and that was that... She is doing great now eating mice... It really gets to me when people have a lack of respect for others who have been through so many years of working with reptiles... I also have to wonder why some of the folks here with so much to say don't post pictures of their work with monitors... They must be able to afford a camera so why no pictures?! Being well read can be a good thing although everything that is written is not necessarily true... And field work is great although hands on working and breeding monitors together with field work I would think to be better.. anyway, thanks for all of the help Frank and i hope I can give back to kingsnake what I have taken ....billy

I don't disagree with anything you say there, Billy.

I have to laugh when people think I am holding back on thousands of cool pictures of wild monitors. One of the things I have been trying to emphasize here lately is that "real" monitors are very sharp animals, and you are NOT getting close to them. Ask Daniel Bennett about that. The principal way you get pictures of wild monitors is to catch them and pose them, in other words, fake the photos. Sometimes (not often!) you get lucky, but those are the times when the camera is elsewhere. I think people also watch too much TV -- where I have worked on monitors, carrying a camera around, along with everything else, gets really old fast -- it ain't like on TV.

Sorry about that, eh.

Ask Daniel about the behaviors he saw here. How about the mertens nesting, he have never seen a monitor nest before.

How about group killing of prey, happens in nature. How about the gestures a group of crosses were making to eachother, he stayed there for long periods of time, he couldn't stop watching.

Ask him why he wouldn't go in with George? hahahahahahaha big chicken. George scares lots of people, but really george is a sweetheart, whoops is that a bad choice of words, sweetheart. hahahahahahhahahahaha, Anyway thanks FR

Hi Rope,
I have pics of V. salvadorii in the wild, and so does a few other people whom both Sam S. and I know - and hopefully this paper on V. salvadorii will be in print sooner than later - any news on that Sam? It is a very compehensive paper I hear!

Sam, that was a terrific post below - Well Done!! Well Said!!
cheers,
mbayless

scavengers follow human scent in the woods........so if you go near or touch a tree or rock or stump with eggs in it you better hope for a hard rain to wash your scent away fast....while reading your posts it occured to me this could be a problem....it's a common way people kill wildlife...i always wear rubber boots and have rubber gloves on and i wash off in every stream i get to..also i don't touch branches...try to approach down wind..nothing like a bunch of people in the woods that don't have a clue on whats really in the woods...they can't see the forest too many trees in the way..........billy

Yep, I do know about that, and when I was working on tree monitors in Australia I kept pretty much to the same walking paths, and did most of my observing without actually getting within 20' of any tree that had an animal in it. It got harder during the late wet season when the speargrass grew up, in places 8' tall and so dense you couldn't see 4' through it at ground level. What happened around then was that a lot of the other wildlife started using the paths I'd made, including feral pigs that were always fun to meet around a corner.

A bad part of this was that a feral cat started using these paths too, and as you describe, it sussed out some of the occupied trees. Nothing a cat likes better than to hide for a few hours next to a tree, and it succeeded in catching several of "my" animals before something really bad happened to it .

I have worried, myself, about Daniel staking out all of the best butaan fruit trees at his study sites, though there it seems that the two-legged varmints are the main predators.

Lotta stuff goes into doing fieldwork, if you don't want to mess up.