Near our home, we have a wonderful patch of bush. It's small enough to run from one corner to another via somewhat straight(-ish) tracks in under an hour. This makes it big enough, with its many single tracks and wide fire trails, to keep it interesting even for those of us living close by.
My partner and I walk or run in there almost every single day. And almost every day we see some kind of animal that is beautiful, interesting or awe-inspiring. This week it was this guy, or girl, I really don't know how to tell the sex of a bearded dragon.
All I know is that it stood out like a sore thumb from a mile away because it was really light and the tree it had climbed up was really dark. Brad, my partner, worked out what had happened immediately; the gravel track less than a metre away is the same colour as the lizard when we found it. Brad surmised that it must have been sunning itself on the fire trail (the track) only just before we arrived and hence, it was still holding the last colour it had changed itself to.
As we stood there and admired it (okay, I admired it; Brad did what Brad does everytime he sees a cool animal: he photographed it from every angle 😂) we saw it change colour in front of our eyes.
It was wild! It immediately made me think of another kind of lizard, the chameleon, that changes colour in a very vivid and obvious way, and that gives us those wonderful meanings I find myself using regularly regarding human behaviour:
chameleon
noun
a person who often changes his or her beliefs or behavior in order to please others or to succeed
one that is subject to quick or frequent change especially in appearance
Now, just to make sure it was in fact a Bearded Dragon that we were looking at and had been seeing all these years and not some other lizard that I wasn't aware of my name, I asked Google:
"Where do bearded dragons live?"
And the very first answer given was this:
Bearded dragons are found across Australia, typically in arid or semi-arid environments. The Eastern Bearded Dragon is widespread, found in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria. It’s relatively resilient to agricultural development, and occurs in areas now urbanised.
So there we go, I guess it's an Eastern Bearded Dragon. Makes sense, we live on the East Coast of Australia!
To check out the difference in colour that I found totally astounding, look at this last photo (above) and then scroll up to the very first photo. Crazy cool, hey? In all these years of seeing bearded dragons I've never seen this colour change. And it all happened within just one minute. Amazing!
All photos by 