HERPETOLOGY

I am unashamedly a twitcher. I spend a lot of my time travelling and photographing birds, only those I get a photograph of count towards my total. My bird photographs I began putting on a blog, which I called 9001birds.blogspot.com. This was created and named after I read an article about the world's best twitcher and how he had just seen his 9000th bird.

BIRDS:  There are over 900 different bird species in Australia. Approximately 165 of these are considered vagrants or accidental visitors. About 45% are considered endemic, found nowhere else in the world. Bird watching, bird photography and twitching are growing hobbies, helped by the growth of social media and easy to use digital cameras. The top twitcher in Australia is Mike Carter, who has seen some 891 species. At the time of writing this I have seen 716 species.


Inevitably I come across lots of other creatures in my travels and recently I was talked into twitching mammals (if twitching is still the term to apply to mammals?). So I created another blog: 9001mammals.blogspot.com.

MAMMALS:    There are 383 species of mammals currently known in Australia, this includes introduced and marine mammals. As far as I know, Martin Schulz has seen the most species of mammals on 306. Of course there are many people who don't keep count but enjoy watching mammals, photographing mammals or studying their behaviour. My count is up to 66.

Well, with the birds, and the mammals, there have also been frogs, snakes, lizards, crocodiles and many other assorted creatures........so its time for another blog: 9001herpetology.blogspot.com.


Herpetology is from the Greek work "herein" meaning to creep and it is the branch of zoology concerned with studying amphibians (which includes frogs, toads, and salamanders), and reptiles (which includes snakes, lizards, turtles, tortoises and crocodiles).

FROGS
There are 5,280 species of frogs in the world, 230 of these are found in Australia, 93% of which are endemic, found only here. The only invasive species of amphibian in Australia is the cane toad. Australian frogs belong to four families: Narrow-mouthed frogs, Tree Frogs, Typical Frogs and Southern Frogs.


REPTILES 
Australia has a large diversity of reptiles, with over 860 species. 

       *   The most diverse group of these are the snakes and lizards. Families of snakes include: front-fanged snakes, rear-fanged snakes, pythons, blind snakes and file snakes.      
       *    There are five species of lizards: skinks, dragons, monitors, geckos and flap-footed lizards.
       *    There are two species of crocodiles in Australia. 
       *    There are no true tortoises but a number of species of turtles. The turtles are divided into marine and freshwater turtles.