A vulture blew up in a bisque kiln yesterday.  Dang!  And it was my own fault, too, a foolish, neophyte error: its body was hollow, and I forgot to make a hole in it for the hot air inside to escape, kerPOW.  The carnage is visible, right.  Fortunately, nothing else in the kiln was harmed.

Vultures have been on my mind recently.  Not only because I’ve been making turkey vulture items like the candle-holder that blew up, and the small “bottle” with the movable head in a recent post, but because of a show I watched recently on PBS.

It wasn’t about vultures.  It was called the Dragon Chronicles, and it was an episode of Nature with a genial herpetologist traveling around the other hemisphere finding examples of real reptilian organisms which shared some of the characteristics of dragons, to promote how each could have given rise to the existence of the legendary fire-breather.  It was a pleasant way of spending a TV hour, but the basic premise seemed a bit of a stretch because the narrator put forth several separate organisms rather than one as possible sources of the dragon legend.

I’ve got a different theory.  I think tales of dragons arose from encounters with vultures.  Think about these “known” characteristics of Dragons:  they are reptilian and large, with snaky necks, they fly, live in caves, horde treasures, are long-lived, wise, fire-breathing, and man-eating.  You can make a good case for each of these also being true of vultures:

Eurasian black vulture. Photographed by Julius Rückert.

Vultures are very large; in the Old World, the Eurasian black vulture of mountainous regions between the Iberian peninsula and Korea is one of the largest birds of prey in the world, massive by both bulk and wingspan (weighing in at nearly 30 lbs and keeping this heft in the air with a nearly 10 foot wingspan).  Its nearest competitors, the Lappet-faced vulture and Andean Condor, are also airborn giants.  With their bare neck and head, vultures are quite reptilian but, unlike modern reptiles, they can fly.  Their contour plumage is stiff and when a vulture rouses (shakes) to adjust disarrayed feathers it rattles like a scale-covered creature, often emitting scraps of fluff and powdery cuticle flakes from feather sheaths.  They lay eggs which are much larger than most birds’, and if broken, would have a baby vulture embryo inside, looking very dragon-like.  Many species of vulture roost and nest in caves and ledges, often in inaccessible peaks and cliffs, where their (to our noses) malodorous lairs are filled with a loose pile of sticks, droppings, and debris — maybe not golden treasure, but a heap of stuff for sure.  In the case of the European vulture-like raptor the marrow-eating Lammergeier (photo below), there are often bones on the ledge, enhancing its image as horder.  When approached too closely, a vulture will hiss loudly, and when pressed further, will sometimes disgorge the contents of its stomach in a forceful jet — like breathing fire.  This disagreeable material (remember they are carrion eaters) is acid enough to be corrosive. A fine deterrent to an interloper, this is also a way of lightening the load for flight.  Most vultures are long-lived, and there are records of Turkey Vultures living past 60 years in captivity.  They are “smart” in the way people mean it, because to some degree all vultures are social, interacting in large numbers at carrion and in migration.  As for man-eating?  Well, long bones in the lair could be interpreted as human by someone who only got a quick glimpse before being driven away by an enraged incubating vulture’s hot projectile carrion slush.  Grimmer still, in times when battlefields and other human casualties were not always swiftly cleaned up, vultures would have made meals of human dead.  As nature’s “Nettoyeurs” (remember Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita?) it isn’t uncommon even today for vultures to be blamed for deaths of livestock they didn’t cause, but were taking advantage of.

Lammergeier, photo by Richard Bartz.

I should add that there are also dragon-type creatures in the mythology of the New World, like the cliff-dwelling, human-devouring Piasa Bird of the Mississippi valley, and of course, Black Vultures and Turkey vultures live in the U.S., not to mention California Condors which had a range of nearly the entire U.S. in the times legend would have been made.  And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of New World vulture mythology; the King Vulture of Central and South America has a prominent place in the mythology of the Maya.

There’s no way to know for certain that vultures were the source of the dragon myth, but I find vultures to be the closest thing to dragons that I’ve personally experienced.

Right now most Vultures that breed in the U.S. are on their wintering grounds, in the far southern states and points farther south.  Even in toasty Phoenix, we won’t see them again regularly until spring, where as in so many places like Hinckley Ohio their return is celebrated on a specific date.  Here in central Arizona, it will be around the third week of March.  So after that, look up in the sky and see if you can Spot the Dragon.

To the right are Turkey Vulture Candle-holders from Three Star Owl (inquire for pricing).

Bonus fact about turkey vultures:  they have an excellent sense of smell, and I’ve heard that some Gas companies use a rotty-smelling compound called ethyl-mercaptan in their gas, to check for open-country gas leaks by looking for kettles of (frustrated!) vultures circling over broken pipeline.

Bonus bonus trivia about Lammergeier, from Wikipedia:

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was said to have been killed in 456 or 455 BC by a tortoise dropped by an eagle who mistook his bald head for a stone – if this incident did occur, the Lammergeier must be a likely candidate for the “eagle”.

The black and white photo of the very vulturine Dragon Bridge is by Barbara Meadows.

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)

Meet Miss Thang.  She is a female Costa’s hummingbird (Calypte costae), and unlike her purple-mustachioed male counterpart, she’s a plain green-gray above, and a plain gray-white below, with a chunky round body, almost no tail, and no neck at all.  She holds territory right outside our front door, as Queen of the Desert Garden.  The garden has many attributes valuable to a hummer: twiggy mesquites for roosting, a many-pointed DeSmet agave for perching, chuparosas with long-season blooms to feed upon, a freebie sugar-water feeder under the porch, and best of all, prime position from which to attract a showy male Costa’s who does looping, zizzing display flights for her each morning.  Although Miss Thang’s appearance is subdued, her personality isn’t.  She holds this valuable, resource-rich territory against all comers, including resident male Anna’s who are both brash and bigger, the summer tourists like Black-chinned hummingbirds, and any other hummers who may try to kype a slurp from the feeder.  The Gila woodpeckers are too big to chase off, and the Verdins seem to come and go with impunity, but other hummers at the feeder are given short shrift.  Speedy tail chases through the mesquite are frequent, although peevish scolding from a perch sometimes inches above the ground are often sufficient to rout invaders.  Her favorite perch from which to keep an eye on her real estate is a devil’s claw and obsidian wind chime, situated under the porch overhang directly outside the front door, shaded in the mid-day warmth, and dry in the rain.  At this time of year, when the door is open most of the day, we can see her perched alertly on the point of the devil’s claw for hours, spinning slowly as the chime turns in the breeze, chattering indignantly when another hummer flies through, or sallying forth to escort strangers right out of the yard.

Costa’s are desert hummingbirds.  They range from southern California, across the low deserts of Arizona, into Mexico.  The sources I’ve checked supply varying info about the yearly movements of Costa’s, giving an impression of the need for more research.  Some experts report they winter just south of our border with Mexico, others say the birds stay year-round in the low desert, some that they winter in the ‘burbs and breed in the less developed areas of the deserts; others just assert that their distribution is not well known.  In our yard in some years, Costa’s seem to be present in each month, with the largest number of individuals observed between June and December.  Some years they seem to disappear around the New Year and are scarce until late spring.  Now that we’ve packed the yard with hummer-friendly flowers (the photo above is Miss Thang’s demesne in full spring bloom) like chuparosa (Justicia californica), Mexican honeysuckle, (Justicia spicigera), Fairy dusters (Calliandra spp.), Desert lavender (Hyptis emoryi), native penstemons, various aloes, and sugar-water feeders, we seem to see more birds more of the year.

There’s been a female Costa’s hummer holding our front-garden territory year-round for at least two years.  We have no way of knowing for sure that it’s always Miss Thang, but of course it’s possible — it even seems likely.  We suspect she nests nearby — I’ve seen her gathering spider-webs in her beak — but have never discovered a nest. (Each year we do see young-of-the-year Costa’s in the yard, but we don’t know where they hatched.)

The yard also hosts glorious males, staking out other food-plant and feeder-related territories.  In past years, a Little-leaf Palo Verde was favored by a bird we called “Cornerhead” because his gorget went from scraggly sideburns to full-blown Yosemite Sam whiskers over the summer into fall. This is his picture on the right.  This year, there’s a long-mustached male (it may be Miss Thang’s suitor) under the pine/palo verde complex shading an outdoor table.  He “sings” (an almost inaudibly high-pitched descending sibilance) and gnats under the branches, keeping interlopers off the feeder there, then withdraws to the thorny interior of a nearby lemon in the middle of the day.  He “sings” from there, too, invisibly in the deep shade which is the only reason we know he’s in there.

Etymology…

…of the scientific name of Costa’s hummingbird, Calypte costae, is less than satisfying.  On the genus, Calypte, Choate, in the Dictionary of American Bird Names, can’t do any better than “Greek, a proper name of unknown significance”.  If he were alive, Gould could probably give a better explanation as to why he chose this genus for the bold Anna’s and Costa’s hummers.  I would suggest that Gould had in mind the adjective καλυπτή, from the verb καλύπτειν, to cover (with a thing).  The adjective means “enfolding”, connoting a veiled or mantled quality, possibly referring to the gorget that covers the entire crown and throat of hummers in this genus.  As for the species, costae, that was given in honor of Louis Marie Pantaleon Costa, Marquis de Beau-Regard, which early 19th century French nobleman had an “imposing” collection of deceased hummingbird specimens.  Merde, alors.

Photos: All photos by A. Shock, Three Star Owl.  The odd quality of the first photo of Miss Thang is due to the image being shot through an old-fashioned heavy metal security screen.

Here is an image of a Costa’s hummingbird mug from Three Star Owl.  The interior is a beautiful rich mulberry, the glaze color I can manage closest to the color of a male Costa’s gorget.

Saturday morning while walking through our neighborhood to the Park, E and I saw one of the local Gray Foxes. We didn’t have a camera! Too bad; it posed obligingly and let us admire it for quite a while: a beautiful, delicate zorro with a most magnificent tail.  It looked just like this:

Photo of Gray Fox by Patti McNeal

Desert Gray Foxes are quite arboreal: we frequently see them up mesquite trees and running along the tops of the block walls that criss-cross our neighborhood. They jump-climb the 6-foot walls easily, and also use them for somewhat coyote-proof napping eyries. Gray foxes rely on their subtle coloration to den out in the open — when they kip they coil up so that none of their black details show, enabling them, like owls, to hide in plain sight. The very first gray fox I ever saw was on a road embankment by the Mississippi River north of St. Louis: the fox was curled nearly invisibly in the thin winter grasses, right on the dirt about at eye level. As we drove past it on a gravel road it barely raised its head to look at us, but the movement revealed its dark eyes and “tear-lines”. If it hadn’t we never would have seen it.

I borrowed the photo above by Patti McNeal, who found this animal in Terlingua Texas. I’ve never managed a photo of a fox that’s any good, although I have been to Terlingua TX. Just for local interest, to the right is a photo I took, blurred and hard to see, of one of our local Grays napping on a neighbor’s wall in the dusk.

Etymology

Foxes are canids, but not Canis, the genus of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals. The Gray fox has its own genus: Urocyon, which is from Greek ὀυρά, tail, and κύων, dog. Its species is cinereoargenteus, from Latin cinis, ash, plus L. argenteus, of silver. Put them together, and its name means “silvery ashy-black dog-tail“. In case you’re wondering, the genus of the Red fox and other “true foxes” is Latin Vulpes, meaning “fox”, which does NOT give us our word “fox.” That is said to be derived through Old English from Old German fukh (the modern German word for fox is fuchs), derived from the Proto-Indo-European root puk- which means “tail.”

Terlingua Texas in 1936, NPS photo by George A. Grant

The Stacked Toad Effigy Vessel is being built from the bottom up, with a brown, groggy, stoneware clay. The working composition is in my head, informed by pictures of desert toads on the work bench, and adapted as it goes. A small maquette modeled last week is nearby for reference, although the maquette has species other than toads in it as well. The Toad Stack is on the scale of a teapot, so in addition to being a Toad Effigy, it could be considered a Teapot Effigy as well: a vessel in the shape of a teapot, if your concept of teapot is broad. Perhaps it will be a Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy.

The Base Toad was modeled solid, allowed to set up to a manageable firmness, then hollowed out and slightly expanded in size by pinching. When firm enough, each limb was cut off one at a time, and a tool was inserted up the center to create a tunnel, then the limb was scored and slipped back into place. The smaller toadly elements are pinched informally into toadly shapes. Each new toad is added when the clay has “set up” — when it’s stiff enough to hold its shape, but still pliable enough to conform to the surface it rests on, and also support the next element. TOES are beginning to appear (Potential Toe Count: 72; Actual Toe Count: 19 so far; current Biological Digit Deficit, 73.5%). Because the interior is hollow, there are a couple of small invisibly placed outlets for air to escape. This speeds drying and will allow the piece to be fired without exploding as the heating internal air expands. When all toadly elements have been added, the surface will be textured in a toadly manner: bumps, bugs, and paratoid glands.

Useful tools: teaspoon and loop tool for hollowing; palette knife and small knife; Tiranti hardwood sculptural tools knobbed at one end and pointed at the other for smoothing internal seams and detailing; toothed metal rib; smooth plastic rib; cheap blow dryer for force-drying clay; wooden paddle made by L.

Our autumnal weather has slowed drying time, so there are lots of gaps in toadly modelling activity while waiting for wet clay to set up. These times are spent in making the next toads, working on other pieces, or going out for excellent sushi at Dozo. In order to prevent the Stack of Toads from settling under its own weight, it will stay loosely wrapped in plastic until tomorrow, with a smooth river cobble wedged under its left front limbpit to help support it until work can resume. What will the Toad Total be?

Increments so far:

…with a guest appearance by Charles Darwin

Marine iguana hands, Galápagos Islands. Photo E. Shock.

Pentadactyly, from Greek πέντε “five” plus δάκτυλος “finger”, is the condition of having five digits on each limb.

I make a lot of TOES. Gila monster toes. Crane toes. Jaguar toes. Hummingbird toes, owl toes, and roadrunner toes. Toad toes. A lot of TOES.

For the last week, I’ve been detailing Horned Lizard effigy bowls. This involves rendering a lot of small features like scales, horns, cloacal slits, pineal glands, and TOES. So it takes a long time, and that length of time is repeated for each horned lizard bowl, leaving plenty of opportunity for wistful thought about such subjects as, how can I finesse five toes on each tiny, fragile, rapidly hardening clay foot, and would anyone notice if there were only four?

“What could be more curious than that the hand of man formed for grasping, that of a mole, for digging, the leg of a horse, the paddle of a porpoise and the wing of a bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern and should include similar bones and in the same relative positions?” –Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Okay, so Charles Darwin would notice. Darwin suggested pentadactyly was strong evidence in support of evolution. So, five digits is significant. A horned lizard has five digits on each limb, just like us, and just like many other animals, whether they are lizards, bats, or whales. With some exasperation, I realized I had no idea why this was — why five?

Needing a break from TOES, I headed to the computer: this is what the Internet is for. A quick search on the web produced the slick answer that we all have five digits because the ancestor of all tetrapods (four-limbed organisms) had five digits, and any modern organism that doesn’t (snakes, horses, most birds, etc) has lost digits through evolution. Well, alright so far as it goes — although it’s more of a description than an explanation — but why didn’t the ancestral tetrapod have 8 digits, or 4, or some other number?

It turns out they did: 8, and 6 and 7, among others. In the last few decades, paleontologists have found some fascinating tetrapod ancestors with a variety of phalangic arrangement probably related to the shift from fins to feet, at least partially connected with the shift from aquatic life to life on solid land. Does all this sound inconclusive? That’s because the significance of “Why Five?” is still being manhandled, pinched and slapped around with the discovery of each new ancient tetrapod, mostly in the North Atlantic land areas like Greenland and Scandinavia, which used to be swampy and warm, prime habitat for critters who wallowed in and out of muddy shallows on iffy substraits. Think Muddy Mudskipper, but Big, and with weird feet. Lots has been written about this, if you crave more detail than can be supplied here, check out an older but seminal essay by Stephen Jay Gould, “Eight (or Fewer) Little Piggies” and Jenny Clack’s website. She’s a professor at Cambridge University in the UK, and seems to be the reigning Queen of Early Tetrapod Research Especially As It Relates to Limb Development. (The image above of Acanthostega is from her site.)

Which brings me back to toad TOES (regular toad, not horned “toad”). As sometimes happens while riffling though the internet, I didn’t find an exact answer to my original question. But a lot of useful info accrued along the way. Like, now I know something I’d had a hard time finding out from pictorial sources, and forgot to count on the Couch’s spadefootlets: how many toes does a toad sport on its front feet? The answer is four (five on the back feet, the opposite of cats), and the next time I make a toad, I’ll have the right number. And be thankful, because it could have been eight.

A couple of mornings ago, we saw our first Cooper’s hawk of the season, swooping nimbly around the big backyard mesquite in an unsuccessful attempt at snagging a dove or finch from the feeders under the tree. It lit on the utility pole in the alley and, having an itchy face, primly scratched itself with a big, bird-catching foot.

Cooper’s hawks (Accipiter cooperii) are accipiters, a group of bird-eating hawk species characterized by medium to small size, spry flight (the better to capture other birds with), short rounded wings and a long tail useful for steering in flight. They inhabit a broad geographic area primarily in the lower 48 states, and a wide range of habitats, including temperate woodland, mesquite bosques, cottonwood stream-sides, as well as neighborhoods and parks. Cooper’s hawks are the most frequently encountered accipiter in Arizona.

If you put out a bird feeder for songbirds, you’re also feeding Cooper’s hawks (and their smaller relative, the Sharp-shinned hawk). Not because they eat seed, of course, but because they eat seed-eaters, like the finches and sparrows that stuff themselves at well-stocked feeders. Our yard hosts Cooper’s hawks most often during migration and in winter, when they lurk inconspicuously in the lower branches of trees, waiting for unaware prey to come within range. All accipiters are capable of tail-chasing smaller birds skilfully through foliage, and take prey either on the ground or in mid-air (see fierce foot above). It’s not uncommon for us to find a Cooper’s hawk under the canopy of the big mesquite on a chilly winter morning with breakfast in its fist, or a feather pool on the ground under where one has roosted and plucked its meal. They favor avian prey, but will take anything they can get, including rodents, invertebrates, reptiles, etc.

Although the strong early morning light in the upper photograph makes it difficult to see, the reddish barring on our recent hawk’s breast and belly means it’s an adult; an immature would have brown dots and streaks instead. Its gray back shows it’s a male; the larger females are brownish above. Cooper’s have fierce red eyes and beetling brows, which give them a “You talkin’ to me?” sort of look.

Photos: top, E. Shock. Right: a very clear photo of an adult Cooper’s from T. Beth Kinsey’s Firefly Forest showing an excellent assortment of field-marks for the species: contrasting dark cap, red barred breast, bright yellow legs and barred tail with relatively wide white terminal band.

Etymology

In Latin, accipiter means “hawk”, from the verb accipere, which means “to take” as in “taking prey”, like the word “raptor”. The species name, cooperii, is named after ornithologist William C. Cooper (1798-1864), a New York scientist who described the Evening Grosbeak.  In places where their ranges overlap, such as northern Arizona and New Mexico, a Cooper’s hawk would love to eat an Evening grosbeak.

This is a Spectacled Owl from the recent Veracruz trip. Spectacled owls are boldly patterned, unsociable owls of tropical forests of Central and South America. This one flew silently in to check us out from its perch high in the canopy, and suffered to have its photo snapped illuminated only by a flashlight, and no magnification. They sport an excellent Latin name: Pulsatrix perspicillata, meaning “female pulsating one” referring to its accelerating pup-pup-pup-upupup call (Pulsatrix-perspicillata-1.mp3), and “conspicuous”, referring to its striking markings.

(Top photo A. Shock, Three Star Owl.)

To the left is a clearer photo of what a Spectacled owl looks like in daylight, taken in the London Zoo.

The first day of autumn has been a red letter day in our yard. Not only was there a Western screech owl calling last night — a new species for the yard, as far as my observations go — but this afternoon, in the heat of the day, a young Desert iguana raced under a creosote bush in the front yard, when I went out to get the mail.

I whipped out my tiny Canon Elph but the little ‘zard was all warmed up from hanging out in the midday sun, and it sped away before hiding in the shade under the creosote where I could see him but couldn’t get a picture. So I pinched this nice photo by Jason Penney from the excellent Reptiles of Arizona website which you can check out for more detailed info about this lizard. When full grown, Desert iguanas (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) are large lizards — almost 6″not counting tail and up to 16″with it — with a blunt face, long tail, and distinctive buffy coloration below a colorful pattern of speckles. This little guy shone pale gold as it raced across the cement driveway; its color gave away its identity even before I got close enough to see him well. Tiger whiptails (Aspidoscelis tigris) the lizards we see most often around here, are darker and lower to the ground.

The little iguana was also exhibiting another trait of its kind: it was out in the hot part of the day, when most other lizards have retired to shaded shelter or underground to rest and digest their forage. Diet is another thing that makes Desert iguanas distinct from our other lizards — they’re largely herbivorous when mature, eating a variety of desert vegetation, including the yellow flowers of creosote bushes, which they will climb to feast on. The first Desert iguana I ever saw was among the spring wildflowers at the Desert Botanical Garden, grazing in the hot sun like a small-scale reptilian cow, even leaving behind it large (for a lizard) fibrous pellets of poop like plant-eaters do. And, yes, they are related to their better known cousins, the Green “Tastes Like Chicken” Iguanas (Iguana iguana) of Mexico and Central America. I don’t know what something that feeds on pungent creosote blooms would taste like.

But this is why seeing him was especially exciting: there are only a few in the neighborhood, and that number appears to be shrinking, at least by informal observation. It’s only a theory, but mortality of Desert iguanas (specifically in our neighborhood) seemed to accelerate after the City re-coated our streets with a dark sealant. It makes for good basking, perhaps, the dark surface heating up earlier and staying warm later than the old gray road, and sadly, for several weeks, I would see Desert iguana roadkill regularly: three along one stretch of a heavily-used street nearby alone. So, seeing this little guy who was perhaps this year’s hatch, or more likely a yearling, was a very welcome sight.

Etymological notes:

Dipsosaurus is constructed of Greek elements, meaning “thirsty lizard”; dorsalis refers to the spine, which in Desert iguanas is protected by prominent, keeled scales.

Tiger whiptail, photo by E. Shock

Aspidoscelis tigris: Aspidoscelis is also from Greek elements, and means “shield leg” because of the sturdy scales on the whiptail’s legs, and “tigris” because it is stripy.