The Eastern Blue Tongue Lizard - With dr dave

(Music plays)   Dave: Dams are a feature of pretty much all Australian farms,   and what you can see here is a great example of a few things you can do to make your dams more friendly for the local animals.   Keeping some vegetation around, leaving some logs, rocks on the ground   can give little hidey-holes for a lot of native animals that otherwise don’t have too many places to hide in the average farm.   Oh, what we have got here? Oh, look at this. Here we’ve got an Eastern Blue Tongue. Come back here. Alright. Just the sort of animal I was talking about.   So this is a little chap that has really benefitted from all this structure we’ve been putting on the ground: the logs, the rocks.   Not only does it give him little hidey-holes but that’s where his food likes to live as well:   snails, slugs, all sorts of creepy-crawlies. You can see his tongue there, the blue tongue.   He uses that as a threat so when a snake or a goanna comes along   he’ll stick out that tongue and go rah, you don’t want to eat me, I’m sick. But it doesn’t do us any harm at all; it’s actually quite a harmless native animal. This is only about half grown or maybe two-thirds grown. They get a bit bigger than this and certainly a lot chubbier in a good year.   One of the golden rules of lizards, you never grab them by their tail because it can break away in your hands and that’s just no fun for the lizard. But these guys are in real trouble.   Foxes, cats and unfortunately dogs, pet dogs, do a lot of damage to this little guy. It doesn’t know about those kinds of predators. It evolved in a landscape where they didn’t exist   and so now, in many farming areas, you very rarely see blue tongues.   Foxes especially eat them a lot.   But there are a few things you can do to really help them out and, as we just discussed, leaving a few logs on the ground,   especially in areas where there’s nice green grass, is a great thing to do for them. You can do this in your garden. You don’t have to live on a farm to do this.   If you’ve got blue tongues in your area,   just leaving a few logs around will be a great thing for them   and they’ll actually keep looking after you, because one of their favourite foods is snails. They love snails. So a few logs around your veggie garden,   not only will you have lots of biodiversity but you’ll have better veggies.   Now, a really interesting fact about these guys,   like most reptiles, they’ve got a third eye, and you see it right at the tip of my finger here.   It’s on that central scale, the one that’s shaped like a diamond,   right in the centre of its head. They use this to work out is it light or is it dark. Should I go in and go to sleep or should I go outside and do some eating.   It’s called the pineal foramen. It’s the pineal holes that goes straight down into the brain and helps the lizard work out when’s daytime, when’s night time. It’s something all lizards have and next time you’ve got a blue tongue in your hands, have a look in the centre of his head and you’ll see what I’m talking about.   (Music plays)