#australian reptile park

[thedimetrodon]

Boop his snoot if you dare 🐍🐍🐍

[rubydolly]

Some of the amazing snakes I saw at the Australian Reptile Park today

SLIDE ONE: Eyelash Viper - part of the Pit Viper family, a family of very pretty but venomous snakes

SLIDE TWO: Western Diamondback Rattlesnake

SLIDE THREE: Juvenile Anacondas - Can’t believe how little and cute these snakes are in comparison to how big they get

SLIDE FOUR: Inland Taipan - The land snake with the most toxic venom in the world

SLIDE FIVE: King Cobra - This guy came right up to the glass, he was quite a show off and who can blame him? He IS a mighty King Cobra after all

SLIDE SIX: Reticulated Python - Just happened to be having a feed when I saw it

SLIDE SEVEN: Ball Python

[beardedmrbean]

Australian Reptile Park

[beranibear]

Went to Healesville Sanctuary, Victoria, Australia.

Thought y’all would like the precious beans I saw today ;-;

See below for animal IDs

Animals:

1 + 2 - Short Beaked Echidnas

3 - Red Kangaroos

4 - Eastern Grey Kangaroos

5 - Goodfellows Tree Kangaroo

6 - Australian Pelicans

7 - Boyd's forest dragon

8 - Rainbow Lorikeets

9 - Red-tail black cockatoos (female + male)

10 - Spinifex hopping mouse

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Red-bellied black snake (Pseudechis porphyriacus), Royal National Park, NSW.

by Keelan Orrock

[mutant-distraction]

Magnificent Tree Frog

Litoria splendida

Other Names: Splendid Tree Frog, Ranoidea splendida

Family: Pelodryadidae, Genus Litoria (Australasian tree frogs) which has 93 species, and usually several new species identified every year.

Size: 8-13 cm

Distribution: Magnificent tree frogs are native to the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It has a limited range, only occurring on the north-western coast of Australia in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Habitat: They enter caves and rock crevices during the day. Much like the other large tree frogs in Australia, White's tree frog and the giant tree frog, they inhabit areas near humans, and can be found around buildings and in toilets, showers, and water tanks.

References: Clulow and Swan, Wikipedia.

About the Magnificent Tree Frog

(From Wikipedia): The magnificent tree frog is a relatively large tree frog. The undersides of the feet and legs are bright yellow. Most specimens have white or sulphur-coloured dots on their backs, of varying densities. The older magnificent tree frogs can be distinguished from White's tree frogs by the presence of very large parotoid glands, which cover the entire top of their heads and droop over their tympana.

It is kept as a pet; in Australia, this animal may be kept in captivity with the

Photo taken at Australian Reptile Park, Gosford NSW.

[nixieofthenorth]

📍 Australian Reptile Park, New South Wales, Australia 📸 @keeper_andrew

[daisywithnomakeup]

P11 "Reg" and No.43 "Clive"

All photos taken by me :3 12" gauge VR P Class in the V/Line Cheeseburger livery. He's a recent build, only being completed back in 2023 iirc. I've had the privilege to drive him and he's a fairly easy-going loco.

12" gauge freelance No.43 "Clive. Built in 1967 for the Australian Reptile Park, North Gosford. From 1975-1997, it was operating at the Smoky Mountain and Grizzly Flats Railroad, Warnervale. After sitting in storage, it was bought by the Melbourne Steam Traction Engine Club and fitted back to service, eventually getting a new livery. Clive's a bit of a pest to drive since there's no notches to set the throttle, unlike most other steam locos. His throttle's fairly sensitive as well, but it doesn't take long to tame the little beast. A few months either before or after the worn down Clive photos were taken, a small derailment happened on the other side of the railway. The back bogies of the first carriage came off the tracks, which I was doing guard training in the carriage behind. Found out later that the bogies had pushed inwards and jammed.

Yours truly driving. The angle makes me look so small 🫠

Derailment

[fromkenari]

The 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfires claimed at least 14 lives, and injured 190 people. The fires impacted the towns of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, both near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The fires are considered one of the largest natural disasters in Tennessee history.

The 2018 California wildfires had a total of 103 confirmed fatalities. The Camp Fire, which occurred in Paradise, California, killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings. The Camp Fire was the costliest disaster worldwide in 2018. It was also the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's history.

The Australian bushfires of 2019-2020 directly killed 33 people and over one billion native animals. The fires also caused 417 human deaths due to smoke inhalation. The fires burned in six states across six months, affecting 80% of the Australian population.

In 2020, 33 people died in California wildfires that burned 4.2 million acres, a state record. This was the third deadliest year for California wildfires since 2013. 

Amid the bleakness of 2020, scientists in Brazil concluded a particularly grim conservation study - attempting to count the animals killed by huge wildfires in the Pantanal wetlands. They estimate that as many as 17 million vertebrates - including reptiles, birds and primates - died. Wildfires burned between January and November, destroying 30% of the world's largest tropical wetland.

Five people have died from wildfires in Canada in 2023. The wildfires have scorched at least 11 million hectares, or over 27.1 million acres, of land across Canada this year.

Meanwhile, in Maui, wildfires started on August 8th, 2023 (Now August 15th, 2023).

The death toll from the wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui is at least 101 people. The wildfires destroyed the historic town of Lahaina and killed at least 99 people, making it the worst natural disaster in state history and the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century. Officials warn that the death toll is likely to rise. Many people remain missing.

None of this is okay, and I'm not trying to compare trauma, but the fact that this disaster is happening right now and I have seen a total of 2 posts about it on my dash is disheartening, to say the least.

P.S. Spread the word. Do not ignore Maui.

[galacticnova3]

i am feeding landia junk food

Landia at Magoland but they split up and start harassing people for food like the free-range emus at the Australian reptile park

[ccohanlon]

into the outback

The track to Palm Valley is an unlikely route for a tour bus. It begins just beyond the Hermannsburg aboriginal mission, 72 miles west of Alice Springs, in the arid, red-dirt emptiness of Australia’s Northern Territory. A large, weather-beaten white sign warns, No conventional vehicles to proceed beyond this point. For 12 miles, the rough-hewn track winds around the dry bed of the Finke River, over angular steps of solid rock littered with sharp chippings and soft patches of alluvial sand, to a deep gorge where rare species of palms, including prehistoric cycads, inexplicably flourish.

It’s hard work even for a four-wheel-drive truck. Not surprisingly, the chrome-plated coaches running daily between the Alice, as Alice Springs is known, and Ayers Rock do not include Palm Valley on their itineraries.

There are a lot of lonely places in the Territory. As the local license plates boast, this is outback Australia, the heartland of popular imagination, where fewer than 150,000 people occupy over half a million square miles of land, half of it a vast semidesert, the Red Center of the tourist brochures, and the other half, the tropical ‘top end’, a little-explored tangle of rough bush and rain forest and mangrove swamps growing into the Arafura Sea. The maps show only a handful of long roads through it all. The majority of water features on this map do not contain permanent water, travelers are cautioned. For anyone depending on conventional vehicles, much of the country is inaccessible.

The tour operators realise this and a few have adapted the fine Aussie pastime of bush bashing, pushing rugged four-wheel-drives across the rough, spinifex plains of the outback, to the benefit of the Territory’s booming tourist industry. Nowadays, depending on how long one wants to go bush and how much discomfort — heat, dust, mosquitoes, flies (especially the flies!), poisonous reptiles — one can take, there are a number of well-organized, adventurous and downright unusual safaris reaching even the most isolated stretches of the Territory.

Bill King’s Australian Adventure Tours is perhaps the best-known of them. Mr. King pioneered commercial four-wheel-drive expeditions not only throughout the Territory, from Ayers Rock to Bathurst and Melville islands, but nearly all of Australia’s seemingly endless wilderness, including the wild, jungle-like country of Cape York in Queensland and the hot, desolate ranges of the Kimberlys in northwest Australia. His company now offers 104 tours. The shortest is a three-hour bus ride around Alice Springs; the longest, a 30-day trek across the Northern Frontier: north to the Kimberlys from Alice Springs via the Tanami Desert, west to the pearling port of Broome, on the Indian Ocean, east to Darwin, Bathurst and Melville islands and the Kakadu National Park, south through aboriginal lands to the Gulf of Carpentaria, then back down to Alice Springs.

But outback itineraries would be less practical, and not nearly as much fun, without reliable off-road transportation. Bill King has, among other vehicles, the Unimog or, more properly, the Mercedes-Benz UL1700L, a desert cruiser powered by a 5.7-liter direct injection 6-cylinder turbo-charged diesel with eight forward and eight reverse gears, which can carry 21 people in air-conditioned comfort. Its slab-sided body, painted battleship-gray, and raised high off the road on big, heavy-tread tires, encloses a walk-in pantry, tool shop, a field kitchen, an ice box and plenty of storage space for the tents, bedrolls and other items necessary to survive, let alone have a good time, in the outback.

Alice Springs is a convenient base for Australian Adventure Tours, as it is for dozens of other tour companies in this part of the Territory. Each year, thousands of visitors crowd this pleasant and thriving near-city — no longer the ramshackle outback town of Neville Shute’s novel (but still in the middle of nowhere) — from where, they can get to the spectacular, orange-colored gorges cut by ancient flood waters in the steep, quartzite walls of the surrounding Macdonnell Ranges or — farther away — to the Olgas and the Territory’s main attraction, Ayers Rock.

A powerful fascination with this “immense pebble rising abruptly from the plain” (as the explorer W. C. Gosse described it in 1873) is one of the few things white Australians, let alone other tourists, share feelingly with the continent’s indigenous peoples. Solid and inspiringly strange, the Rock - the aborigines call it Uluru - embodies the Dreamtime, the ancestral legends of aboriginal prehistory. Despite the deeply felt objections of aboriginal elders, tourists climb to its summit in the quiet, cool hours before dawn and watch the rising sun illuminate the domed heads of the Olgas, Katatjuta, 20 miles to the west —one of the Territory’s most compelling sights.

Roughing it is an essential part of the outback adventure. On a Bill King tour, life is reasonably easy with a cook, as well as an experienced bush driver and guide, on hand at their campsites. On the Red Center itineraries, standard coaches and a choice of motel accommodation are provided for those inclined to travel less rigorously.

For those with an insatiable streak of masochism, going bush and roughing it can be taken a step further. Rod Steinert, a well-known local guide and tour operator, organises bush survival programs of up to three days in the harsh semi-desert south of Alice Springs. The approach is simple enough: for $75 each a day, a small group is led across the badlands by aborigines who will instruct in the crafts of the nomadic hunter-gatherer. Sleeping outdoors with poisonous snakes and rodent marsupials understandably might make one nervous, so creature comforts — camp beds, swags, conventional food and water — are carried if required.

Mr. Steinert also offers less drastic itineraries, including wild-life safaris in which, with any luck, one can try roping a wild camel or dogging fast moving hordes of wallabies, as well as day trips to cattle stations and aboriginal missions.

Rod Steinert is himself a student of aboriginal lore and I first met him at Ewaninga, an aboriginal ceremonial site on the Old South Road to the Alice. A talented raconteur, he was carefully explaining the complex rock carvings at the site to an elderly couple from South Australia. Despite the heat, which quickly sucked the moisture from our skin, and the annoying persistence of the flies, he managed to convey the awe of ‘the duck Dreaming’ and its very real relationship to the blistered surface of a nearby clay pan. “The tribal elders didn’t read these carved lines,” he said as he traced them with his fingers. “They’d look away and then recite the legend from memory; some of these lines were simply reminders.”

Aboriginal culture permeates the Territory and rock paintings. Carvings and other artifacts can be found practically everywhere. Later, while drinking black billy tea together and munching spotted dog, a kind of raisin pudding laden with syrup, Mr. Steinert told us, “Don’t believe it when you hear that the significance of these and other markings are long forgotten. There are elders, very much alive, who understand them. They could explain them if they wanted to - but they don’t want to.” Mr. Steinert is sometimes recommended as a guide to visiting anthropologists by the aborigines’ Central Land Council, which administers the land rights of central Australia’s huge aboriginal reserves.

For the scores of small, four-wheel-drive operators advertising unusual overnight camping tours from the Alice, the routes now extend as far east as the old Arltunga gold mine and ghost town on the edge of the Simpson Desert, as far west as Palm Valley and the Finke River National Park (or, in Mr. Steinert’s case, the Yuendumu aboriginal reserve), and as far south as Ayers Rock and the Olgas. In the north, the 'top end’, the rain forests, fast running rivers, deep gorges, hot springs and even the wildlife, particularly east of Katherine and in the Kakadu NationalPark, are perhaps even more beautiful — if commonly unreachable at certain times of year because of monsoonal floods.

However, there are alternatives to a four wheel-drive for traveling in the outback: camels, for instance.

Noel Fullerton and camels are seemingly inseparable. Among a plethora of colorful characters in the Territory, Noel Fullerton is one of the more sober and enduring. You can even find him on postcards: a squat, barrel-chested fellow with a mane of long white hair and a sunburned, bearded face not unlike an Afghan trader’s, he is commonly pictured atop a dromedary in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. He started the infamous annual Camel Cup Race down the sandy bed of the Todd River and won it five years in a row. He rode a camel up the steps of the Federal Parliament building in Canberra to protest the delay in extending the Ghan, the railway between Alice Springs and Port Augusta, South Australia, to Darwin. And now he operates safaris on camel-back from his ranch south of the Alice.

Throughout the year, with the exception of January, Mr. Fullerton and another guide lead caravans of up to 10 camels on one of three routes, depending on the time of year, usually in a series of daily treks from a base camp in the Rainbow Valley. The most interesting of these is probably through the Finke River National Park to Palm Valley, following as it does the path of the earliest explorer, Ernest Giles. Like others in the outback travel business, Mr. Fullerton is prepared to tailor an itinerary to suit individual urges — one customer, a young American woman, reportedly spent three months just wandering with one of his guides through the Krischauf, James and Macdonnell ranges and the hard plains between.

The outback is not a place in which to take chances. Unless one is experienced, an outback safari of one sort or another led by a competent guide is the best way to get into the rugged scenery, the unusual flora and fauna and just the silent, endless space of it all. Even if one is prepared, there is always an element of risk.

I recently went bush with a couple of friends in a Japanese-built four- wheel-drive truck. Loaded with camping equipment, food and a .44 magnum rifle (which nobody used), we went looking for a track to Mount Conner in the twisted scrub 20 miles south of the newly-laid Lasseter Highway to Ayers Rock. We could see the mountain from the highway, a long flat ridge of crumbling purple rock standing alone in an expanse of yellow spinifex, but the track was harder to find. We followed a few disused drovers’ routes into dead ends before coming across an unlikely looking turnoff covered in fine red bull-dust and sand.

“You’ve got to be bloody careful,” warned the proprietor of the Curtain Springs roadhouse, back at the highway. “It’s rough going, so don’t even try it without four-wheel-drive. And let me know before you set off. If you get into trouble, I’m the one who’ll have to fetch you out.”

He wasn’t kidding. It was a slow haul, scraping past the gnarled branches of trees blackened by bush fire and easing the wheels over the bleached-gray remains of corral fences. Finally, we stalled; the truck sank belly-deep into a sand dune. We deflated the tires and unchoked the wheels and tried to ignore the sine-wave tracings of snakes that were everywhere in the sand.

We wished we’d taken a tour round the Alice instead.

First published in The New York Times’ Travel & Leisure section (under the by-line, Chris West), USA, 1984.

[rubydolly]

In this picture is the most beautiful girl in the world!!!! And there’s me sitting with her draped over my shoulders.

This is Fluffy the Burmese Python. Think this is now my fourth picture with her?

[beardedmrbean]

Tawny Frogmouth sings it's song looking for love

australian reptile park

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Forest dragon (Lophosaurus spinipes), Springbrook National Park, Queensland.

by Isaac Wishart

[ultrajaphunter]

Size of this Crocodile Elvis in an Australian Reptile Park