Bad news kept us up far too late Friday night — nothing personal, just the same bad news everyone knows about — and so I got a much later start today than I would have liked. By the time I finally got myself caffeinated and out the door it was two. So I set my sights short: a little hike, three miles, but in a place I hadn’t been to yet. I took the Palm Canyon/ Victor Trail loop, with maybe three hundred feet of elevation gain.
It felt good. Hiking up along the swift-flowing creek through a grove of native fan palms for a mile and a half, surrounded by happy dawdling tourists, I was only a little annoyed at the presence of so many other humans. That was a good sign. The creek was alive with dragonflies and some sort of mostly black Admirally butterfly I need to look up. After a while the Victor Trail breaks off from the trail on the canyon bottom and starts to climb one of the canyon walls a little way, doubling back toward the trailheads. I took it, and left almost all the people behind.
It was a great day for lizards, once i got out of the shade. There were sideblotched with bright blue tails, dozens of bristly scaled granite spiny lizards, and two chuckwallas in the last mile and a half of hike that hadn’t quite pulled their fat tails under cover of rock before I happened by. Black-throated sparrows and Gambels quail were abundant, the former on the ridges for the most part, the latter in the wash.
Driving slowly back down the canyon in Annette’s Little British Convertible as the sun passed behind the mountain, I slowed for another granite spiny lizard crossing the narrow road in front of me. It stopped to face me, did some pushups at the little car exposing his blue belly in a display of territorial dominance. A few years back in the Grand Canyon I was lying on my stomach in the shade of a cottonwood and saw the granite spiny’s cousin, the desert spiny lizard, a foot in front of my eyes on the tree trunk. He did the same lizard pushups at me. His belly was green, a shiny olive color. It occurred to me as I lay there that my shirt was the same color as his display patch, and I did a few pushups right back at him. His eyes seemed to get very wide, and he did a few extremely hurried head bobs at me before he ran away. The granite spiny today brought that to mind, and if Annette’s Blue Mini had low-rider hydraulics I might have tried for a repeat performance. But we merely stalemated there for a few seconds until he wandered off the other side of the road.
1 comment on "Sceloporus orcutti"
Damn, I miss chuckwallas.
Even scelops (orcutti is a cool one, though); even Uta.
All we have out here are these skinny Italian guys.