Yesterday was a beautiful, hot sunny day, so I thought I'd check up on Heather the heath monitor (my new, tacky name for ms heath). Not seeing her the day prior didn't come as a surprise, because the weather was horrible, but her absence yesterday suggests that things are not looking good.
The last time I saw her was on Friday, when she was looking very much due to lay, and the weekend was beautifully hot and sunny. She should have been digging like mad and laying at some stage over the past few days, but unfortunately hot, beautiful weather also means a lot of foot traffic in the area she's in. We've had a horrible summer, weather-wise, so people are taking advantage of whatever beautiful weather they can get on weekends and there are a lot of people out hiking. I suspect she got hassled by kids over the weekend and had been put off. Consequently, when I visited the mound on Monday there was only a tiny bit of evidence of any digging since Friday. That wasn't surprising.
Not seeing her yesterday, however, was very surprising and I suspect she had been hassled enough to be put off entirely, to the point of having a failed reproductive event. There's a glimmer of hope she has another termite mound nearby that she's also been working on, but considering the effort she's been putting into this mound I suspect that's not the case. I'll check again later in the week, just in case, but I strongly suspect that the show's over.
Needless to say, I was very disappointed. Not wanting to go home empty handed (or empty memory-carded), I took a few photographs of surrounding 'stuff'. The interesting thing I found, while wandering around looking for other termite mounds nearby, was how quickly the heath habitat near the mound changes to lace monitor habitat when one goes down hill. This may explain why I've seen two lace monitors walking past the mound on previous visits (unless they were specifically hoping to find a freshly laid clutch to eat, rather than just passing through).
The beautiful gum tree in the foreground of that last shot is a scribbly gum,
Eucalyptus haemastoma, so-named for the tracks in its bark made by the larvae of the scribbly gum moth.
Now that summer is over, the golden orb-weaver spiders,
Nephila edulis, start appearing everywhere in large communal webs.
Female with freshly caught prey
Mid-sized female and her male partner. As the female grows over the next few weeks, the difference between these two will be even greater.
Of course, I also went looking for lace monitors and then spent a fair bit of time getting video and photographs of one wandering around, foraging. It was Darkface.
With all of the photographs I have of him over the years, I often find I have several of him in the same or similar pose.
2009
2012
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