If you should never smile at a crocodile, then you can certainly never quiz a frilled neck lizard... not at close range anyway. The Frilled Neck Lizard, the lizard emblem of Australia, can get extremely upset if you invade its territory. But despite its wide mouthed hiss and frilled display it's really all show. It is not poisonous and will soon run away.

The frilled necked lizard spends most of its time, in fact 95 per cent of its time up trees, but an experienced handler can get them down with little trouble. And the reason Tony Griffiths wants to capture this lizard is to record its vital statistics for a CSIRO study being carried out in Kakadu National Park.

Tony Griffiths: "The hardest thing is actually to spot them to begin with. And the best way to do that is just to drive along in the car and you see them out the window just sitting there on the tree trunks and from there you just jump out and grab them with your hands."

The biggest danger to the lizard is bushfires, that not only destroy the vegetation they live in, they destroy around 30 per cent of the frilled neck lizard population. This lizard's frill is badly damaged and its tail stunted by fire. But there is one advantage for the lizard population.

"After the fire, that actually doubled the amount of food that they were eating, because of the area being cleared of grass and they can get all of the better access to their food which is insects, termites and centipedes".

So although the bushfires are bad news for many, the surviving lizards eat an improved diet. This gives them plenty of energy to run like the wind, when people come prying.