The Backyard Porch (2)

 

In the last post I described our back porch and how we lured the Road Runners, medium-sized carnivorous birds, to come to the porch and feed tamely out of our hands by offering them meal worms, which they could not resist. In this  post I want to describe some of the smaller animals that decided to show up for the feast as well. One of the first to come was a Cactus Wren, a common, rather attractive bird famous for its wild sewing-machine song heard often in the desert.

But in fact it wasn't birds that came most often, it was lizards. After all, what other kinds of animals are more characteristic in a desert? When it began to warm up in our first spring here, we began seeing lizards in the distance, burly creatures running to challenge every other lizard that came too close to their territories, pumping up their big chests and doing their rapid pushups. With their sharp eyes they quickly discovered the porch and the meal worms, so that when we got up in the morning and went out they were already lined up side-be-side only half concealed in the rosemary plant on the edge of the porch trying to be the first one out each time a worm hit the ground.

The lizards, as well as we can make out, are, first of all, Desert Spiny Lizards. They come in every color. The males often have a purple area along the back.

 

 

Here is one taking a meal worm from my fingers.

 

Next, Whiptail Lizards.

 While we are feeding the Spinytail lizards two Whiptail Lizards will suddenly appear and go running at full-speed through the other lizards, slipping breakneck on the slippery porch surface, at top speed rising up slightly on two legs. This lizard is unusual because most species of whiptails (not our species, however) consist only of females, and the young are born by parthenogenisis. In the wild they are alert and shy, but ours quickly tame down, and will sit in Cheryl's hand while she feeds them meal worms. 

At the end of the porch there is a rather flimsy gate, at the inside of the which is the cement slab. Outside the gate the slab ends, making a sort of curbstone, down to the dirt of the field outside the enclosed area. There is an open space of about four inches under the gate where the Road Runner and other small animals can squeeze through (but which is too narrow to let the Javelinas in, which is its purpose). There is another species of lizard that is too shy to actually live inside the gate, but do all their foraging about thirty feet away across the field . If they are chased by a predator they can run like the wind. These are called Zebra-tailed Lizards. When they are running all-out from, say, a hawk flying close overhead, they carry their two-colored tail up in the air, wriggling it like a worm, so a predator will aim at it, and at worse break off its tail while the lizard escapes with the rest of himself.

 

 

 Why we enjoy them so much is that from their twenty feet or so distance outside the gate they are watching everything that is going on in our side of the gate, and from time to time they can't stand it anymore and they come galloping over, jump under the gate, grab the closest meal worm they see, and then go galloping back out through the gate, their bandit raid a success!

There are two more lizards we don't feed (because we don't quite know how to)  but we certainly need to mention.

The first is a nocturnal species with suction-cup toes, that lives inside the house rather than outside. My guess is that they live in almost every house in Tucson. It's the Mediterranean House Gecko, a non-native species that takes up residence in houses.

You'll find them in showers or unused fireplaces. People often notice they have them in their house for the first time on a hot  evening when they see them clinging to the screen on an open window.

I was talking about their "suction-cup toes" out of laziness but their toes that allow them to walk upside-down on the ceiling are much more complicated than that. (Don't expect me to explain it.)

The last of the lizards I want to discuss is one of the most exciting: the Gila Monster, Arizona's celebrated poisonous lizard. The former owner of our house told us they occurred here, but we wondered how we would ever find one since they only came out after dusk, and spent almost their entire life underground. But in fact we saw one wandering up a ditch, and from then on for several weeks they kept appearing everywhere. They were more or less tame, or at least, totally ignored us. Their bite is evidently very painful though not particularly serious, but we knew better than to try to pick one up. We tried to feed them eggs or meat but they never paid any attention. Each had its own unique markings and we thought if we photographed every one we saw we could check their patterns and work out how many we had, but it wasn't all that easy, and besides it was fun just getting to see them.