The Monster's Return

 When we bought our house here in Tucson a few years go we could tell by looking at it it would be wonderful for wildlife, and it has lived up to our expectations, bobcats, wolf-sized coyotes, Javelinas, rattlesnakes, huge tarantulas hunted by huge wasps. There was one creature we hoped we would get to see, but didn't think there was much chance of it: the Gila Monster, the brightly-colored slow-moving poisonous lizard. They stay underground most of the year only coming out for  few months in the summer to do all their feeding (they eat small mammals) and mating. Most people in Tucson, we are told, have never seen one. So we were delighted in our first year here when we began to see them crawling around the backyard. 

We guessed we probably had five or six living here. We took careful photographs of every one we saw, because it appeared that each one had an individual pattern, so all we would have to do is count how many different patterns we had, and that would tell us our population. Well, we looked as carefully as we could, and could only find two patterns, meaning we only had that many.

And now they appear every year, usually around the end of April, and each time it is those two. 

Well, we rearranged parts of our backyard last year, doing a lot of digging, and we were a little afraid we might have disturbed them while they were in their underground phase, and we wouldn't see them anymore.  But at the very last minute this year, April 30th, one appeared. We got out all our past years' photos, and we could tell it was one we had seen regularly since 2019.

Below is a picture from 2019.

Here is a picture from 2022. Notice on the 2019 the lower-case letter "g" on top towards the back and the same mark on the 2022 photo. (Their patterns are so complex the easiest thing to do is to look for something very distinct in the pattern.)

Below is a picture from 2019 from the other side showing, around the middle,  a "3."

 Here is a picture from 2022 showing the same "3".

Now we are waiting for the second monster to show up, or, even more interesting, a completely different, third individual.