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Herps

Return of the Long-tailed Brush Lizards

Readers may remember my first encounter with a Long-tailed Brush Lizard, about this time last spring. The story is at this LINK. I have been sort of looking around for more the last week or so but could not find any. Yesterday, I decided to take a better look around. After an hour of searching creosote bushes in vain, I switched to looking at some of the larger trees along the washes. Finally, after over two hours of searching I found one in a Cat’s Claw Acacia. It was immobile and perfectly blended into the bark. After taking a bunch of so-so photos (the lizard was almost inaccessible due the thorns), I tried again this morning. With a search image and a better idea of where to look, I started finding more, ending up with four.

My favorite, a displaying male. There was a female nearby. Too bad that one stick got in front of it.
The female, mouth open. To get the entire tail in the image results in this. I rotated it to horizontal.
A cropped view of the open mouth.
I took over 100 images this morning! To avoid the effects of the harsh sunlight, I used flash and stopped down to f19.
Another shot of the male.
A good view of the dorsal scales, there are six rows of enlarged scales running down the center of the back, diagnostic of Long-tailed Brush Lizard.

Last one, for now. It is very difficult to get a catchlight in the eye of lizards in general. Flash helps but they have to turn their head just right to get it. A catch light brings the eye to life.

4 replies on “Return of the Long-tailed Brush Lizards”

Hey Doug, just got back to the desert, thankfully, and got caught up on all your April photography. Stunning images as usual, so fun to see them all but I especially liked some of the astrophotography of remote galaxies, really quite amazing. We need to have you show some of your astrophotography at a membership meeting of CPNHA sometime, I think far flung galaxies, super novas and other heavenly bodies qualify as natural history! The owl photos are fabulous too btw, love the elf owls but especially liked the screech owl with the giant desert centipede, nice catch!

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