The Rex Hunt Guide to Herping

Herptiles are reptiles and amphibians. Herping is the act of searching for herptiles and it is a lot like fishing. Actually, herping is not much like fishing at all. For a start, you don’t use a barbed hook to drag your quarry from its home by its mouth. There are some similarities. Like fishing, a bad day of herping is a day spent cold, wet, frustrated and bored beyond belief.

Flipping rocks, peeling bark, busting logs, up-rooting vegetation and digging burrows are some of the more common techniques employed to find herptiles. These techniques work very well and are very productive for young, fit and enthusiastic herpers that get all giggly when they un-earth a species of tiny, fossorial (litter dwelling) skink they have never seen before or a cute little geckonid with big beady eyes and a wee-small knob on the end of it's tail. 

But I am older, wiser and a little more jaded. I have spent more than 20 years flipping, digging, raking and peeling and, these days, my body demands that I take a much more refined and considered approach to herping. Thus I prefer to go ‘road cruising’. 

As the name suggests, road cruising facilitates the relaxation of both body and mind midst the comfort of a climate controlled vehicle  as it glides effortlessly along the black top where probability alone is the mandate that ensures that you will find the herptile you seek. More simply; if you drive along the road with your eyes open you will find stuff. 

As well as being a spectacularly relaxing way to pass the time, road cruising is can also be fun for the family, even if they are not at all biologically orientated. It is like 'I spy with my little eye' with the added bonus of a concussion every time the driver (that's me) sees something that excites him. It is with absolute certainty that I will slam on the brakes without warning and without looking to see if there are any cars behind me. Midst my excitement, I will also disembark from the vehicle with much vigour, leaving the vehicle in the middle of the highway without the handbrake engaged. Such is the excitement of seeing a new species or a great example of a species I have seen a dozen times before.

Even when the family is sick to death of playing 'I spy for Dad's little herp' I will continue to surreptitiously scan the roadside in a relentless search for reptiles. I am acutely aware that, whilst on a family holiday, I must not vanish into the wilderness to go herping whilst my family grows evermore impatient waiting in the car. I learnt this after our last vacation in Queensland. So road cruising is my only hope of finding my first ever Copperhead (Austrelaps superbus). 

Photo courtesy of Barry Goldsmith

I have traveled within the known distribution of this ridiculously common large elapid on many occasions, but I have never had the good fortune of finding one. With 14 days of driving around Tasmania ahead of me I am certain that this is my best chance to see one. And when I do? I shall giggle like a school child. I shall catch it, play with it, take a photo of it and let it go. But unlike, Rex Hunt, I won’t kiss it as that would just be weird.

When I return to Western Australia please don’t expect me to regale you with stories of the unsurpassed beauty of Tasmania’s wilderness for I will not recall a single mountain pass or turquoise bay. Like all good herpers I shall only be able to recount the colour and texture of the bitumen and the heterogeneity of the vegetation about three to four foot either side of the roadside.