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Flowers and Plants Herps

Another Lifer

This is another species I’ve been looking for a long time. The Round-tailed Horned Lizard is the smallest of the horned lizards. It has a fairly extensive range across northern Mexico, New Mexico and west Texas, including this area of New Mexico, so I expected to stumble across it someday. I just didn’t think it would take this long. Finding horned lizards in general is mostly luck. This one seems to require more luck than the other species. Round-tailed Horned Lizards are masters of crypticity. Only when they move to get out of the way, does one see them.

A Round-tailed Horned Lizard. I got this one on a four-mile hike this morning. This species, like most horned lizards, can change its color to match the substrate.
The light was pretty harsh, but the photos turned out OK.
Here’s a shot from above.
I also found this flower. I’m pretty sure this is Small Wirelettuce, Stephanomeria exigua. It may be another species of Stephanomeria. I’ll try to get an ID from iNaturalist.

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