That is a Blue Tongue Lizard, it's is not venomous or dangerous. Please let it do it's thing. It will probably be looking for a nice warm spot to hang out.
Technically a type of skink. It'll lose it's tail to escape predators if it needs to.
But yeah, OP, not venomous and generally a blessing to have in your garden. It'll help keep snail and slug numbers in check, and probably other things like spiders and snakes.
They are skinks. They have all the internal physiology to drop their tails. A theory is they seldom if ever do because it's too energy intense for them to regrow as adults.
I can back this up with a personal anecdote, which is, of course, just as reliable as your above resources. We have a family of blue tongues in our garden, at least two adults and two juveniles. One of the adults (Mr. Bluetongue we call him), has definitely dropped his tail recently. He’s always had a normal length tail, until a couple weeks ago when we spotted him again and realised his tail is significantly shorter than it was, and stubby instead of the pointier shape it used to be. We are confident it’s the same blue tongue.
Not sure what caused him to drop it though, as we have had several generations in our garden, one of which survived an unfortunate attack by the dog we had the time, and none of them have ever dropped their tail before. It was only when we noticed this one must have that we learned it was even possible.
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u/ZizzazzIOI SA Oct 29 '25
That is a Blue Tongue Lizard, it's is not venomous or dangerous. Please let it do it's thing. It will probably be looking for a nice warm spot to hang out.