Tips to find herps around Alice Springs, Australia?

Howdy! Some friends and I will be heading to Alice Springs the beginning of Nov for a couple of weeks and this is primarily a herping trip. Although for 3 of the 4 of us, it is our first time in Australia so all wildlife is going to excite us.

I’m curious if anyone has some good spots for us to check out to get photos. Perenties and molochs are high on the list, but we also want to make the most of the trip. We will have a car so we can venture further from Alice Springs, but we have a place there that will be our base camp. We do have a day we will head towards Uluru so anything out that way is also welcome.

Thank you!

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I would just look at iNaturalist observations in the area to see where they are. Very few people share herping locations on a public forum like this.

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It’s an arid environment, so in general things are few and far between, and things without roots that want to stay alive tend to be shy and well camouflaged, move around a large territory, and mostly stay out of the worst of the daytime heat and the nighttime cold.

So assuming you want to see things in the wild, it’s mostly a game of serendipity and the best advice is Expect Things Everywhere and explore as widely as you safely can as much as you safely can, but don’t fixate on looking for particular things, that mostly just makes you not see the fascinating things that are there.

It’s been a while since you could climb Mt. Conner, but I stood toe to toe with a large Perentie that had been invisible on open ground right up until I skidded to a halt face to face with it while running flat out and leaping from boulder to boulder down the talus … That’s probably the closest look I’ve ever had of a genuinely still wild one - but perhaps not the method I’d recommend to try and get one.

Other known to be effective methods for encounters that I’d not recommend include: camp wild and leave lots of food littered around your campsite. And sleep with your tent open at night …

But really, November can be really hot out there, and is on the cusp of the start of the tropical wet that you’ll be on the southern edge of, which will limit how much you can sanely explore on foot - but how much and what you’ll see is generally going to be related more to how much time you spend traveling around with your eyes keenly open than to exactly where you go.

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Obviously public land, road corridors and national parks are good places to consider because they open to the public. Google Earth will show you where these are or contact tourist info centres. Recommend you take headlamp, LED torch or night vision gear and do some nocturnal hunting.

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That’s good advice in general, a lot of critters there tend to be crepuscular if not outright nocturnal (though it might be a bit on the chilly side for many herps) - but in this specific case …

I pushed back pretty firmly against whipping up ‘stranger danger’ fears in another thread here - but in the case of Alice, it can be a very different place at night to what you see during the day. If you’re not in the company of long term locals (and sometimes even if you are), a lot of the things that might be effective elsewhere (staying in a group, not looking ostentatiously out of place, not obviously carrying valuables, not looking vulnerable, being able to connect with people and talk down conflict, being somewhere well lit with camera surveillance) might not be nearly as protective as you’d hope.

There’s a lot of deeply entrenched disadvantage there, and a long history of oppression, so there’s not a lot of grey left separating You as a visitor with good intentions from the Them that have instilled generationally enduring resentment - and a tension between the people who want to bring tourist dollars into the town and the people whose lived experience is that this only disadvantages them even further.

It really is an incredibly beautiful place to be out in at night, particularly away from city lights and if you’re out there with clear skies and a new moon - but it can also be pretty Mad Max anywhere that’s not well away from any people who aren’t Already Friends. Most of the people you’ll meet there really are fundamentally lovely - but things can, and more often than many places sometimes do, turn really quickly and with very little warning.

I could tell a bunch of Much Stranger Than Fiction absolutely true stories - but I’ll just say this is on the short list of places where I’d really emphasise the need to be constantly and especially careful and to get good advice from as many trusted locals as you can when planning where and when to go, over (my normally preferred method of) just following your nose toward whatever looks the most interesting at the time and figuring everything else out as you go.

It’s that brand of ‘potentially hostile’ which has places that can be dangerous, people that can be dangerous, weather that can be dangerous, roads and trails that can be dangerous, places that are taboo to everyone, places that are taboo to just men or women, places that can lure you into walking past a point of no return, ‘rules’ that nobody told you, and situations that can totally upend your normal expectations of what is or isn’t safe. There’s a whole lot to love, but it can be a really tough love…

So I’d personally be a little hesitant to recommend freely roaming the streets or surrounds of Alice at night, especially with flashy looking photographic equipment and NVGs … but if you can safely get well off the beaten track, there’s a good chance of seeing things that you won’t quickly forget.

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Thank you for all the really good info. I don’t think we plan on looking in town much and are going to head away from town to do the hunting. One person I am going with made friends with someone from the reptile centre so I know we are meeting up with that person at some point and they are taking us to some spots.

I generally keep my head on a swivel per my job, but I was also in Bangladesh during the times of the beheadings which also kept me really watching my back. I’m sure I won’t forget most of the things I see, I’m looking forward to exploring.

I know we are planning on sleeping during the heat of the day. None of us are keen on littering or drawing animals in with trash or bait, we prefer the luck of finding them. And with 4 sets of eyes looking around I’m hoping we are able to make up for what a single person misses when looking around.

Please be aware, though, that @environ 's remarks about “a long history of oppression,” “people whose lived experience is that this only disadvantages them even further,” and “places that are taboo to everyone, places that are taboo to just men or women” also apply to Uluru. There has been a lot of resentment over tourists in the past climbing what the local Aboriginal people consider a sacred site.

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I’m already aware of that, also why I’m calling it by the proper name. The Anangu people were able to get climbing permanently stopped years ago. Also why where we are staying when near Uluru is run by a foundation that works with the Aboriginal people.

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Sounds like you’re going to find your way around and fit in pretty quickly :) I suspect most of what you’ll end up wishing for is much more time to really take in everything there is out there without feeling rushed!

You’ll probably find the Uluru / Kata Tjuta park area to be a bit “Grand Canyon Village” if you know what I mean. A great place to meet lots of international travellers - and spectacular country - but a bit laser focused on just those things. And very different to Alice. You’re not likely to stumble into trouble without walking past clear signage warning you of it, and essentially the only settlements nearby are Yulara, which is a resort village, and Mutitjulu which is a private Anangu community that you can only access by invitation. Though there are places there which it’s taboo to photograph - so you can guarantee there will be a moloch curled up asleep on the head of a perentie right in front of one of those …

We’re long past the days where there was an airstrip right at the base of the rock, a chain line marking a trail up it, and a free-for-all of hotels and rough camping scattered everywhere around it. It’s still a place in transition - but maybe that’s just another way that it’s special, because even people who wouldn’t otherwise care about traditional culture, now mostly leave with some better understanding of it than when they came.

I guess I was a little loose with my words earlier too - I didn’t really mean ‘litter’ in the sense of leaving things that you never pick up before you leave - more the idea that if you turn your back on anything edible for more than a few seconds, don’t be surprised to find it become someone else’s dinner … things like food left out during meal prep. I’ve even put a dinner plate down briefly while I was still eating, then watched a tortilla scurry away off it into the bushes. Though that time of year the flies might already have you defending food pretty diligently …

Likewise with the tent thing, everything is looking for shelter from predators, the heat, or the cold, so in a place where there’s not much of that, anything you leave open on the ground can quickly become habitat that you should check before you stick bits of your body back into it.

The area west of Alice, out to Watarrka, is just as spectacular, and might be a bit less crowded - it’s a bit more strenuous to explore which tends to whittle people down pretty quickly.

Hope it’s an awesome trip, full of things you didn’t even know you were going to be fascinated by until you were!

I stayed at the resort in Yulara in November of 2022 (my first time in Australia) but wasn’t too successful with herping. Lots of sweet spiders out at night, though, among other things. You can see my observations here.

The trail around Uluru goes out pretty wide, especially for some areas that are considered sacred, and there’s good signage telling you where you can and cannot photograph it, which great.

Local car rental companies tell you not to drive at night and have some photos at the rental counter of cars that hit large mammals at night. So I just walked around the resort and found lots of inverts to photograph.

Getting flies on my face was annoying, but not annoying enough for me to put up with a face net after trying it for a few minutes. But I’ve heard they worse later in the summer.

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Just a quick search shows some good information:

Basics:
https://ulurutoursaustralia.com.au/blog/are-there-snakes-at-uluru/

https://landforwildlifetopend.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/snake_brochure_mar09.pdf

NT Govt pamphlet; common-snakes-and-lizards-of-central-australia.pdf

https://weareexplorers.co/herping-intro-snake-spotting/

Parks and reserves in the Alice Springs region:
Parks and reserves in the Alice Springs region

Australian Reptile Online Database
https://arod.com.au/herping/finding/

And of course iNaturalist: iNat observations: Northern Territory Alice Springs area- Reptiles

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