Lizards taking over

 Meal worms are costing us a fortune, but they are our magic potion to tame the smaller animals on our porch. A creature comes up on our porch a first time, then when we come out to greet it it timidly rushes away. But by the second time it comes it realizes all that happens is a scatter of delicious worms appears at its feet, and it doesn't ask any more questions.

For instance we had a pair of roadrunners for going on three years coming up on the porch for handouts  and they ended by nesting in our front yard and raising young. They weren't tame in the sense that we could pet them or touch them, but they would walk around at our feet and snap up the meal worms we tossed among them.  We already had blocks set out for the quail, and half a dozen feeders for the hummingbirds. And now whatever birds were in season began getting in line for the worms,  And then, a  surprise,  we soon had a row of lizards lined up in the vegetation on the edge of the porch that would dart out and grab a worm then race back into hiding.

That's where the trouble came. You see, we loved our roadrunners, but we quickly came to love our lizards too, and roadrunners eat lizards, and it seemed our lizards were disappearing. We didn't know quite how to handle this, but this year the roadrunners seem to have moved over to an adjoining yard, and suddenly our lizards are returning. And amazingly the roadrunners almost instantly stopped coming, and one by one the lizards began reappearing.

This is one of the first to come back, the Desert Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus magister). They are often brightly colored with golden scales (and often a purple square on their backs), the males all swashbucklers, standing sideways to each other, making their chests as deep and masculine as possible, and doing their pushups. The biggest ones dash in for the most meal worms, and sometimes they get  into real battles.

   

Here's one making its chest look larger.

 

There are several lizards in the "Spiny Lizard" complex. The next most common is Clark's Spiny Lizard, which is separated from the "Desert Spiny Lizard" from the fact that it has four or so black bars going around its forelegs, which I sometimes have a difficult time recognizing, and find a better  mark in the fact that it is often a greenish color.

 

  

 

 

 

Once they have determined which males are the fiercest, the males notice all the females and then instead of looking fiercest they try to look their handsomest, showing bits of the blue on the underside.

 And when the female sees a man she likes (females generally have reddish coloring around the head) they get close together with the male and begin going around and around  in a tightening circle.

They can end up being as violent as they were competing for meal worms.

 

 

But then peace returns to the land.