Monitor feeling rough after egg-sploits

IT was not eggs-actly the meal this hungry goanna was expecting when he raided a chicken coop in northern NSW in search of a feed.

The half-dozen eggs the big lace monitor thought he was devouring turned out to be golf balls, left under a broody hen by her owners to encourage her to lay the real thing.

The reptile, dubbed Tiger (as in Woods) hit the rough when he swallowed the balls – along with three real eggs – in a chook pen at Ocean Shores, north of Byron Bay.

Feeling somewhat fowl, the goanna ended up in the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary Hospital here on the Gold Coast, where head vet Dr Michael Pyne feared he would have to operate.

But in a sweet stroke of luck, the lace monitor regurgitated all six golf balls to avoid going under the scalpel.

“He would have been feeling a bit unwell but once he brought all the golf balls up, it was happy days,” Dr Pyne said.

“He’s very lucky – if the balls had found their way into his intestine, it would have caused a serious blockage.”

Dr Pyne said he had treated snakes that had swallowed golf balls but never a goanna.

He also urged people with chooks to make coops snake and goanna-proof.

Tiger, meanwhile, has been released back into the wild.