The tales of the bobtail lizard

Bobtales of the old Lizard 10-08-08
I saw two bobtails through this window last week.
I don't know why I feel the urge to report such observations, now a week after the event, but I had thought to but I just hadn't acted on my thoughts...
The usual story.
Actually, I know now why I am writing about them.
These two that I saw were big, fat and seemingly at home in the leaf litter.
One was following the other, nudging at its tail as it went.
I didn't know that such lizards lived in this locality, especially with the number of students and noise here abouts.
But, no, here they were, seemingly unaffected by the noise around them, and within this enclave they were hidden, or so they thought, from prying eyes.
And so the question arises, are we, too, capable of finding and living in such gardens unaffected by the dramas of the human world around us?
I know that the old bobtails are not without their problems.
Blood-sucking ticks often invade the folds of their skin and rest between the scales of their armor and sometimes dig down into their ears until they fill the ear cavity like an earplug.
Maybe we share with the bobtail more than we first realise.
We seem to be happy living in suburbia, and like the bobtail we have periods when we become fat from the food we eat.
And although we don't carry ticks, we do have any number of parasites sucking the juices from outside of us.
While we don't have ticks burrowing into our ear cavities, we do allow the media, a space between our heads, glued as we are to our TV and these TV hybrids called personal computers.
These are the human electronic ticks and all the while they are digging deeper - they have moved from our ears from the sound of the radio to the visual impregnation of our brains with their coloured blueprint visions of the ideal and the heroic.
TVs are our ticks and so too are computers and mobile phones that radiate their heat.
But no one can see it.
The ticks that dig into the bobtail are camouflaged, and the bobtail has such poor eyesight it cannot see what causes its discomfort.
How I envy the Luddite among us, the old people who relied on swarming ants and the black cockatoo for their meteorological predictions, rather than the satellite pictures on their TV, within their newsprint or computer.
We share more with the bobtail than we care to realise.
Hell, some of us even have a love of eating snails...