17-06-2025
Mysterious find in Woolworths car park wall sparks Aussie dad's rescue mission
A Woolworths shopper was mystified by a discovery in a supermarket car park on Monday night. Chris Williams was unloading his groceries into the boot of his car when he noticed something inside a hole smashed in the wall.
'My wife sent me down for bread and milk,' the Sydney dad told Yahoo News. 'I was steadying the trolley against the wall, and then inside one of the fist-sized holes, I saw a reptile sleeping. I genuinely had to do a double take, I didn't expect that at all.'
While most customers hurrying to get home from the West Ryde shopping centre car park wouldn't have known how to respond, as luck would have it, Williams is a reptile expert. Not only is he the founder of Urban Reptile Removal, he's the president of the Australian Herpetological Society.
Of course, Williams was immediately able to identify the species that was sleeping soundly in the hole as an Australian native water dragon. Because darkness had fallen, the animal had its eyes closed and was easy to rescue.
'He was sound asleep in that cavity. I was able to squeeze my hand through and grab him by the back of the head,' Williams said.
'But he came to life much more enthusiastically than I expected him to. So for a minute, I was a bit concerned he was going to wriggle out from under my fingers and disappear into the cavity.'
The lizard was found deep within the ground-level car park — a dangerous place for a lizard to be. With the shopping centre surrounded by houses, roads and very little green space, Williams admits to being stumped by where he may have come from.
'I still haven't come up with any logical reason,' he said. 'He looks in really good condition, but I don't know how long he'd been there for."
While snakes often end up in shopping centres after hitching rides in cars, Williams believes this behaviour would be less likely with a water dragon.
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He thinks the animal is wild rather than an escaped pet, because unlike bearded dragons, water dragons don't do well in captivity.
Despite the weather getting cooler, water dragons are still active during the day and haven't entered long-term brumation, a state of dormancy similar to hibernation. Williams is now on a mission to find a place to release the dragon that's nicer than the West Ryde car park.
'I'll spend today finding somewhere nice for him to go. He'll be fine. He'll work it out,' he said.
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