Gila Monsters

 When we moved here, and the wildlife began to reveal itself to us creature by creature, one that we hoped for was the Gila Monster. We knew these big colorful lizards, one of three species of venomous lizards in the world, were found here, but we didn't know where to search for them. They only spend 15 percent of their life above the earth. How could we possibly be looking that way just as they popped up their head? But in fact one day one was walking up the ditch on the left side of the yard, then there was one on the porch. Then we noticed several quail gathered tightly together attentively following something and when we looked at them with the binoculars we could see they were following a Gila Monster.. And that is how it has been since. We don't search for them. In summer they simply present themselves to us when we are not expecting.

They are so tame and slow-moving, and make such wonderful subjects, that we photographed every one we saw. Though they all looked similar, actually each had its own pattern, and we realized that by closely examining each photo we could tell if we were looking at a new one, or the same one we saw yesterday, and with a little work we could decide how many different Gila Monsters we had here.

Well, it wasn't a little work, it was a lot of work, which is why I didn't do it last year, but this year I have finally got down to it. One problem is, the right and left side are completely different from each other, so we have to be careful to photo both halves, and then keep the photos together so we knew they were the same individual. Let me show you how it works.

If you look in the center of the picture on the right side of this Gila you will see a mark that looks like "3." Now look at the same Gila in approximately the same place on its left side, you will see something that looks like a lower case "g." From now on, if you get a good look, you will always be able to recognize this individual.

Let me give another example.

The middle of the right side of the tail has two black "1's" against the orange background, and then at the base of the tail something sort of like the letter "A." Now look at the left side of this same individual. The base of the tail has a black "1." Next out is a black square, and finally a black "?."

We have seen some of these in 2019, 2020, and now again in 2021. And now to gather all our dozens of pictures together to estimate the total number of Gila Monsters found  in our yard. 

Alas, we only seem to have seen these two!

Juggling

We love all the wildlife here, but unfortunately the wildlife doesn't love each other, and since we use meal worms to attract everything right up to our house, we end up having to do a lot of juggling to keep the worst enemies separated from each other. We're not always successful.

We especially like the carnivores, and realize we have to have prey animals on our land to feed them, and that is all right with us. The prey animals are more numerous, and generally have less charisma, than the carnivores. The trouble comes when the big carnivores want to feed on the smaller carnivores. 

Here's how it shakes out. Cooper's Hawk is a major predator and mainly feeds on the larger birds like doves and quail, and ground squirrels, all animals with enough meat on them to be worth the effort it takes to catch them. We have tons of quail and doves and squirrels, so that is as it should be.

Bobcats I believe take mostly rabbits, which is what we also have lots of. When I have found their kills, the bobcats have eaten all but ends of the legs, and a sack of entrails, just as a cat would leave after eating a mouse.

Coyotes are more opportunistic. Family parties often trot through on a broad front so one coyote can chase a rabbit or other small animal across to be intercepted by a coyote on the other side, or anyway that is what they seem to be doing. Also they eat carrion.

But here is where we begin to have problems. In our first year here, when we sat out on our back porch with our morning coffees and tossed out meal worms we quickly began to attract lizards, handsome big Desert Spiny Lizards, doing pushups and showing off their deep chests as they competed for worms, and  narrow Whiptail Lizards that ran across the porch chasing each other and reaching such speeds that their front legs lifted off the ground. These all quickly tamed enough to take the worms out of our fingers.

 

The everyday small birds came too, Cactus Wrens and Curve-billed Thrashers, seasonally White-crowned Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers, our little bunch of 3-4 species of hummingbirds, all smallish and not of much interest to carnivores.

Then one day a roadrunner came, and, offered meal worms, immediately became our tamest bird, that sat in our laps as long as the worms were coming, that followed us from window to window if we didn't come outside soon enough. What do you suppose they eat when they aren't getting worms? lizards.

  So there was already a bit of tension when our lizards were out, and one, and now increasingly, two roadrunners, suddenly arrived. Usually the lizards quickly slipped into hiding. And the roadrunners had their own worries. Sometimes the roadrunners would look intently up in the sky, then freeze where they were standing, and we would get up and look the way they were looking, and there would be the Harris's Hawk sitting in the top of the pine tree, and there was instant distrust between them. 

Then there was a new thing, because the two roadrunners were male and female and the male would catch a lizard, and shake it sideways to attract the female's attention, then come after the female shaking the lizard, and the female would take off running away, but beginning to slow down. And now sometimes, as he was running after her, he would jump high in the air, and that must have been part of the show, and then they  would mate for a long time, and only when he was finished would he hand her the lizard.

 

Sometimes when he didn't have a lizard he would hand her a bit of stick, which presumably was meant to suggest the beginning of a nest. Then we could see now they were nesting on a huge growth of mistletoe over our front door, and after a while when we gave them a meal worm they didn't eat it themselves, but they would take as many in their mouth as they could without dropping them all, and carry them around to the nest, which meant they were feeding young. We read that they could have up to ten babies and we wondered how they would handle that. Would they bring them all to the porch together? The parents weren't just carrying them worms, they were also decimating the lizards to feed them. We had noticed that if we looked over the house across the street into some tall mesquites a pair of Harris's hawks were mating, perhaps thinking of building a nest. 

There was a commotion over our front door. It was the Harris's Hawk, We chased it away, but it had already cleared out the roadrunner nest of its nestlings.

On Scorpions

 I don't know what it says about my character that people think Scorpions make perfectly appropriate gifts for me, but they do. The species I usually end up with is the Stripe-tailed Scorpion. It's the commonest species around, its not dangerous, it tends to eat whatever you offer it, from meal worms to whatever dead insects you pick up. I kept one for over a  year once, until one day I found it dead. For all I know that's how long they live. (Note in the picture the stripes in the tail.)

The scorpion is the iconic desert creature. Jillian Cowles, in her opulent and very complete book Amazing Arachnids, has pictures and discussion of the twenty species of scorpions found in Arizona. Since arriving in Arizona a couple of years ago I had acquired a scorpion from time to time, and I admit, even using the big photographs in her book, I have had a very hard time identifying any of the species. I didn't have much luck in getting them to feed, either, so I finally turned them loose. Also they often seemed to have rather slender pincers, which was in the description of the very venomous Bark Scorpion, a species we had not yet seen, and for all we knew these were Bark Scorpions, which Cheryl didn't want to have around the house, since our very inquisitive and hands-on four-year-old grandson regularly spent time here.

That brings us up to date.

My daughter-in-law's mother found a scorpion in her house and, thinking I might want it, saved it in a jar, and asked her daughter to ask me if I would like to have it. Just in case it might be something unusual I said I certainly would like to see it, so my  daughter-in-law brought it to me.

 "Is it just a Stripe-tailed?" she asked.

Yes," I answered, scarcely glancing at it, and tipped it out into an empty aquarium. Since scorpions like to hide out of sight during the day, I put in a gnarled piece of bark for it to hide under. Later, someone else wanted to see it, so I reached into the aquarium with my hand and picked up the piece of bark and turned it over so we could see the markings on the scorpion's back and get our first chance to identify it. But instead of sitting on the ground under the bark it had turned upside down so it could cling to the "roof" of the piece of bark, so we still couldn't see its back.

That night after I went to bed it suddenly occurred to me that the Bark Scorpion, the dangerous one, was noted for hanging upside down on the "ceiling"of whatever it was it had taken shelter under, and suddenly I was trying to remember if I had closed the lid of the aquarium carefully, or if I had closed my study door so the cat would not hear something rustling in the aquarium and go in and try to tip it over, something it had done before.

  It didn't bother me enough to cause me to get up and investigate, but when I woke the next morning I went straight in and, using a stick rather than my fingers this time, I turned it up and examined it carefully, and sure enough it was a Bark Scorpion.

Bark Scorpions, like the Stripe-Tailed, are one of the few that are identifiable at sight, though in this case it is because they are so sinister looking (unless it's just because you know their sting has caused deaths, at least in old people in poor health). Here's what they look like.

You can make them even more sinister, if you know that they fluoresce. If you shine an ultra-violet light on them they shine up even more eerily (plus that is the easiest way to find a scorpion in the dark.) 

I enjoy having this one but since I can't get it to eat anything, in the end I will have to let it go. What I'll do (once I get it into a jar to carry it) is I will take it down to the bottom of our land and release it in a tangle of cholla (and hope we don't hear later that our neighbor was stung).