The desert provides a lot of life if you walk slow and look down a lot. The swell was full of animal life–birds, lizards, and insects, plus some pronghorn antelope, etc. The problem is that the animals living in the desert don’t want to be seen. This little guy I almost stepped on but he scurried away, but horny toads don’t move quickly as lizards go.
The Great Basin has two subspecies of H.T.s. This one is a Phrynosoma douglassi, a Shorthorned Lizard. This is a less horny of the two toads that live in the Swell.
Luckily they’re easy to catch, and my lizard-catching skills, long dormant for 40 years, came back as if I were wearing overalls and stuffing lizards in my top pocket so I could surprise my sister with them at opportune moments.
Whitney named him Charley and wanted to hold him.
Respectfully submitted,
Canoelover
You’d think that a biologist was writing this blog 🙂