E. Gippsland, Victoria, Was A Treasure Trove Of Diverse, Rare Lizards & Snakes; Now It's An Ash Heap
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Lifting up logs and rocks, Clemann would usually expect to find dozens of skinks, but he found only a handful of survivors among the charcoal. At other sites nearby, he found none. The swamp skinks are among the astonishing 2.46bn lizards and snakes estimated to have been in the path of Australia’s fires last summer.
Clemann is a reptile specialist and has been out across Victoria assessing the impacts of the fires. He’s worried about the alpine she-oak skink, which doesn’t burrow but hangs around on vegetation that would have been incinerated. Some patches of its favourite habitat were spared, but others around Mount Kosciuszko were not.
He says until last summer’s fires, the places around East Gippsland had always been considered a refuge for threatened lizards. A place for them to hang on. Now he’s not so sure. As the Guardian revealed last month, an interim report from 10 scientists estimated that almost 3bn animals were in the path of Australia’s bushfires. More than 2bn of those were squamates – also known as lizards and snakes.
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“We tend to overlook that the lizard population can be in the tens of thousands and will have a big impact on other animals like the insects they eat but also the birds and warm cuddly mammals that eat them.” During workshops to develop the most recent action plan, Chapple says, no one had entertained the idea that the impact of fires could be so widespread. “With these fires we’ve seen entire regions being burned and that was a scale of threat that we did not believe was possible. “It’s made us reassess the way we try to estimate the likelihood of an entire species being lost.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/15/land-of-the-lizards-victorias-east-gippsland-was-a-refuge-for-threatened-reptiles-the-fires-changed-that