This is not a quoll. It is a dugite, one of Australia’s many highly venomous snakes. It is brown and speckled.

The Atlas of Living Australia is a comprehensive database of species of animals, plants and fungi with location information. So, for instance, if you want to see if someone’s neighbourhood is infested with horribly poisonous spiders and snakes, whack that person’s postcode into the ALA’s handy lookup tool and see what natural science has to say.

When i put my postcode in, as well as dugiltes our old friend the chuditch came up. The data has been obfuscated somewhat but what that tells me is that chuditches have lived within 20km of my house this century. This pleases me, although the prevalence of feral cats and foxes and feral dogs (as opposed to dingos) does not.