Ecologists call these little creatures Canberra's "Goldilocks species".
Grassland earless dragons struggle when the grass is too long, or too short like it is at the moment. They need medium-length grass to provide the perfect amount of shelter, food and burrows.
The dragons' need for conditions to be just right, like a certain fairytale character, has them in trouble.
That's why at this critical time of the year for breeding, ACT Parks and Conservation Service ecologists have been out creating burrows for the endangered species.
They're poking holes about 18 centimetres deep and roughly 1.5 to 2 centimetres wide to create what is considered the perfect burrow for the animals.
The dragons don't create their own burrows, instead relying on other animals. But exactly which animals is unclear, and the burrows are increasingly sparse, leading ecologists to start making them artificially while they investigate.
ACT Parks and Conservation Service ecologist Dr Brett Howland said populations of the species of grassland earless dragon unique to Canberra had declined by 90 or perhaps even 95 per cent in the past 15 years.
They once covered a much larger part of the ACT, but today there are only four or five populations left, across the Majura and Jerrabomberra valleys.
Dr Howland said it was hard to estimate exact numbers, but he believed there may only be about 500 grassland earless dragons remaining in the wild in Canberra.
"What we've found is over the last couple of years, with dry conditions and over-grazing, mainly by kangaroos, burrows are being lost from the landscape," Dr Howland said.
"Who's making [the burrows], we're not sure. It's something we're investigating. But we think it's a complex interaction between wolf spiders, the Canberra raspy cricket and the emergence of moths and butterflies.
"Going into another spring, we've decided we need to start making burrows to provide the females somewhere to lay their eggs.
"We're putting out a couple of hundred burrows across high-quality habitats in the hope the animals can use them over spring and summer."
Dr Howland said burrows were critical to the life cycle of Canberra's species of grassland earless dragon.
"They use them in winter to escape the freezing cold temperatures," he said.
"They also depend on them in summer to avoid very, very hot days and predators.
"For the females, they're especially important over spring because they lay their eggs down the burrows and then cover them with dirt. Three months later, the babies emerge from those burrows.
"It's very, very important for the survival of these dragons to have burrows in the landscape."
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Dr Howland said the ACT Parks and Conservation Service was working to manage kangaroo numbers in an attempt to prevent over-grazing, as well as trying to stop the spread of African lovegrass.
But with those factors and climate change posing a threat to the dragons, he said there was a need for "a back-up, like a Noah's Ark-type system".
That's why the ACT Parks and Conservation has set up captive breeding programs with "a few dozen dragons" at the University of Canberra and the Melbourne Zoo.
It will soon start a similar program at Tidbinbilla, with the aim of boosting numbers before reintroducing some dragons into the wild.
Dr Howland and fellow ecologists were out catching male dragons at the Jerrabomberra grasslands on Friday to boost the captive breeding populations.
"It's basically an insurance population, just to make sure that if we go through another severe drought, we don't lose this species," he said.
