A night on Mount Tamborine—in pictures

A great barred frog and leech in Tamborine National Park. 

Last Friday, I headed up to Mount Tamborine so that I could visit the Piccabeen Bookshop run by the local Landcare group, and find some rainforest snails to photograph after dark. 

The trip was a great success, as not only did I find beautiful books and snails, I also found a menagerie of other amazing creatures, most of which I’d never seen before.

Here is a gallery of some of those finds, including notes on each.

This southern leaf-tailed gecko (Saltuarias swaini) was 

honestly one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen. 

It is a very big gecko compared to the introduced house 

gecko I am most familiar with, and its camouflage is

excellent—I just happened to look in the right direction at 

the right time.

I was crouching down and observing my first giant panda snail, when I saw a movement from the corner of my eye: a snake crawling slowly over a tree buttress. It turned out to be a golden-crowned snake (Cacophis squamulosa), a mildly venomous hunter of sleeping lizards. I had read that crowned snakes do a threat display before they bite, where they rear up and almost headbutt an attacker, so I knew I’d get a warning if this snake felt like I was invading its space. It turned out to be a very placid animal, and I thanked it by not outstaying my welcome.

I thought of the snake again when I later found this orange-tailed shadeskink (Saproscincus challengeri) spending the night not in the leaf litter, but elevated on a palm frond. Clever skink!

My first pill millipede! Unlike other millipedes, Sphaerotheriids have no chemical defences, and protect themselves by curling tightly into a ball. I was caught off-guard by the size and robustness of this creature, as I had expected it to be small like a slater.

I was surprised by the amount of frog activity given that it is almost winter! One of my first finds for the evening was a tusked frog (Adelotus brevis) on the boardwalk at the Tamborine Mountain Landcare Centre. I also heard whistling treefrogs (Litoria verreauxii) and great barred frogs (Mixophyes fasciolatus) at this site, with the latter species being seen again at one of the nearby National Parks.

There were plenty of spiders in the rainforest and probably the most fascinating were the Brisbane tube spiders (Arbanitis longipes). A type of trapdoor spider that neglects to build the trapdoor, small colonies of this species dotted the soil between many of the buttress roots.