Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Sam,

A belated thanks for your reply below. I heard a rumor about those Blue tails a week or two ago while at one of the zoos down here. I got the impression (maybe misguided??)that they were from the western side of the cape (north of weipa).

On a different plane how did you get that glebo to sit still?

Regards,

Scott

Interesting, Scott,

Thanks for the further info -- as I noted, I was only asked my opinion on the ID, and didn't get any details as to the locality. As far as we know, V. doreanus is not a mangrove dweller in New Guinea, but there are some fairly extensive paperbark swamps and bits of monsoon forest along rivers on the west side of the Cape above Weipa, so who knows. We will all learn in good time, I trust.

Ha, getting V. glebopalma to sit still is a bit of an art! They will sometimes do so if you pop up well inside of their normal flight distance -- for example if you come around the corner of a ledge and surprise one sitting 2 m away -- but it is awfully hard to surprise a glebo! There are two other ways, one being to release a just-caught animal while towering over it, so it freezes (that's how the photo in Varanoid Lizards came about), and the other is the old string around the waist routine, again while releasing a captured animal. I have a series of slides I sometimes show, starting with a head shot of a beautiful big male, and stepping back until you can see the string!

I have one shot (my favorite) of a big male completely on his own, who was so focused on a brown falcon sitting on a ledge nearby that I was able to get within about 10 m. I'd take a step or two, take a photo, take a step or two, etc., and was really getting it right just when I ran out of film.