Every afternoon when my partner gets home from work we go for a walk. Somewhere between him taking off his work boots and have a short rest but before dinner, we head out to explore our local chunk of bush here in outskirts of Brisbane.
We have a default 4km loop that we enjoy walking that takes us about an hour, and it's good on rainy days (as we tend to get over summer here) because this wide path rarely gets too wet to be bothersome.
But I love (read: totally adore) the single tracks, i.e. the bush tracks that are narrow enough that only one person can walk along them at a time. Sure, I don't get to walk side-by-side with my love, but he's always just behind me and we can still easily hear each other as we talk.
So if ever my intuition pulls me towards a single track then I'm quick to follow it, making up a new route, on the spot, to get us home since there are a myriad of tracks in this particular bush reserve.
Yesterday I got the sense to do just that; leave the wide, main path and head onto a smaller track. And gosh, I'm glad I did because just a minute or two down the track and I heard a rustle just a metre ahead of me. At the same moment I saw a flash of movement, and I knew we had something big on our hands.
I immediately stopped talking and walking, and my partner was quick to sense that there was something to be alert about. Sometimes when I pause on the track he gets annoyed because he wants me to keep walking, but something about the immediacy of the way I'd stopped talking and even moving must have told him I was a little bit scared and a big bit curious!
I had a sense that what I was looking for was not a wallaby (they hop away quickly, crashing through the bush as they go), not a snake (they usually sliver away so quietly you wouldn't even hear them) but rather a very, very large lizard.
As I slowly crept forward along the right side of the track, I peeked my head around the tree on the left side, and lo and behold there was a goanna looking just as alert as me!
Goanna is the general name given to this group of lizards that are very similar. This one specifically (as far as I can tell as a layperson) is a Lace Monitor.
Like all lizards, they are predatory (as in, they hunt and eat other animals) and can be quite aggressive, however - thankfully! - they tend to scurry away from humans and almost always right up the nearest tree!
In the 20 years that my partner has run in this chunk of bush he's only ever seen a goanna a tiny, tiny number of times. Yet, this is the third goanna we've seen in the last two weeks! We feel so very fortunate to see these creatures. It feels magical, special and just scary enough to keep us on our toes 😉
(All photos taken by my wonderful, patient partner 
At the kind suggestion of 
