Canberra's Tiny Earless Reptile that Lives In Wolf-Spider Burrows

This week's #FloraAndFaunaFriday favourite

I first met the Grassland Earless Dragon on Ngunnawal Country in 2015 when I was Australia’s Threatened Species Commissioner. It sat like a tiny sculpture in my palm - calm, perfect, impossibly delicate - and then vanished down into a wolf-spider burrow. That’s home for these dragons: they borrow the architecture of invertebrates, living and sheltering in spider and insect tunnels across natural temperate grasslands.

And true to their name, they don't have ears! They still detect sound as ground-borne vibrations, perhaps a neat adaptation for squeezing through spider holes without snagging.

Another reason I love these little lizards is that they're Canberra locals. The Canberra Grassland Earless Dragon (Tympanocryptis lineata) is listed Critically Endangered and hangs on in a handful of grassland remnants around the ACT and nearby NSW. Their biggest threats are exactly what you’d expect for a grassland specialist: habitat loss and fragmentation, weeds and rank grass, and the cascading impacts of climate change and predators. Keeping grass short, open and patchy - how these landscapes evolved and were managed by Traditional Custodians - isn’t tidying for looks; it’s survival ecology.

Here’s the hopeful part. Canberra refused to give up. Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve has built an insurance population with Melbourne Zoo which is now underpinning careful reintroductions. The ACT has also put real money and policy behind recovery and an Action Plan to steer adaptive management.

And nationally? A dragon many of us had written off just made a comeback. In Victoria, the Victorian Grassland Earless Dragon - not seen for almost 50 years and listed as Australia’s most imperilled lizard - was rediscovered, with specially trained dogs now helping locate further individuals so conservation breeding can begin in earnest. Proof again that if habitat hangs on, so can hope.

One counter-intuitive truth I love: these dragons can actually do better with some grazing. Moderate, strategic sheep grazing (and/or winter burns) keep grass swards open, stop weeds and dense thatch from closing over burrows, and maintain the “short-grass mosaic” the dragons need to hunt, bask and bolt. It’s a great example of conservation working with agriculture, not against it.

Why they matter

Grassland Earless Dragons are a flagship for temperate native grasslands, one of Australia’s most cleared and least protected ecosystems. They’re part of the food web - they're prey for birds and reptiles; and predators of invertebrates. And they’re living reminders that small things hold whole systems together.

I think Grassland Earless Dragons are one of Australia’s most adorable reptiles. But their story isn’t just charm; it’s a case study in patient, applied conservation: decades of monitoring, brave policy, community buy-in, and (yes) some sheep doing useful work. That combination gives these tiny dragons a fighting chance.

Photo: Gregory meeting a dragon in 2015 - still one of my favourite conservation memories.