A large goanna walking through a picnic area can attract an audience immediately. If it climbs a nearby tree, the encounter may become even more dramatic. For a Lace Monitor, however, a tree can be ordinary feeding habitat, a shelter or an escape route.
The useful response is to leave it space and remove opportunities to scavenge around people. A close encounter is not an invitation to feed, touch or move it.
A ground hunter that also needs trees
The Lace Monitor, also called the Tree Goanna, occurs in eastern mainland Australia. Museums Victoria describes a powerful lizard with a long, flattened tail, pale markings on a dark body and bands that broaden towards the tail tip. Large animals can be around two metres long, including that tail.
It searches for a varied animal diet, including insects, reptiles, birds, eggs and small mammals. Carrion is food too. Finding a goanna beside a carcass therefore does not prove it killed the animal.
Its feet and claws make it an effective climber. Museums Victoria records both foraging in trees and sheltering in hollows, as well as feeding on the ground. A goanna heading up a trunk may be seeking refuge after being disturbed. Following it to the base of the tree can keep the disturbance going.
Why the tongue keeps flicking
Field of Mars Environmental Education Centre explains the monitor’s use of a forked tongue to collect chemical information. The tongue is part of how it investigates its surroundings and searches for food; it is not a display that tells a person the lizard is about to attack.
These reptiles also depend on suitable conditions for activity. Basking and moving between warmer and cooler places help regulate body temperature. A quiet animal resting on a log and an actively searching animal on a warm day may be showing different parts of normal behaviour.
Leave the animal’s route open. Neither its tongue movements nor its apparent stillness gives you a safe reason to approach it closely.
Termite mounds can shelter the next generation
Lace Monitors can use termite nests for egg incubation. The enclosed nest provides a more stable environment than exposed ground. NSW National Parks describes females opening termite mounds to lay and returning to help hatchlings emerge.
This is an interesting association between a large reptile and the much smaller animals that construct its nesting site. It also makes a termite mound more than a lump of soil in a photograph. Do not open, probe or break one to look for eggs or young.
Old trees, hollows and fallen timber also provide important shelter. Keeping a woodland useful to goannas involves retaining these features, rather than supplying food to an individual at a picnic table.
Campsite encounters and regional differences
South Australia’s parks guidance recommends securing food and rubbish, avoiding feeding and observing from a distance. Teeth and claws can injure someone who threatens or corners a monitor. Keep children back, leave a clear escape route and follow the park’s rules about pets; do not allow a dog to approach.
The same guidance describes greater activity during warmer months. Local distribution varies too: the South Australian populations are concentrated around parts of the Murray–Darling Basin and isolated southern Flinders Ranges locations. A broad eastern-Australian range does not mean the species occurs at every campsite across the country.
If a goanna keeps approaching an occupied area, secure attractants and ask park staff for advice instead of trying to catch or chase it. An injured animal needs licensed wildlife help. A healthy one usually needs the simpler courtesy of enough room to carry on.