The Collared Lizard
As with any young boys, my cousins and I often roamed the canyons around our homes in Phillips, Texas, to see what we could find. This story touches on one of the lizards native to the area around our homes.
The Collared Lizard
When we were young boys, my cousins Ricky , Scott and I used to roam the canyons down behind their house to the south. There were canyons full of red dirt clay, large limestone rocks, and mesquite bushes that we wandered around in looking for what we could find. One thing there was plenty of in the canyons was collared lizards.
This is what the canyons we roamed around Phillips, Texas, looked like with the red clay dirt, the limestone rocks, the scrub mesquite trees and the collared lizards.
The majestic Collared Lizard perched on top of a rock watching what’s going on around him.
These guys were blazing fast and extremely hard to catch. They would rise up and run like crazy on their hind legs and then stop perched on top of a rock and look back at you as you tried to sneak up on them, just before you got in range they would run like crazy and find another rock to sit on. The only way we could catch them was to surround them and come at them from three directions.
The Collared Lizard up on his back feet running full speed to avoid his would be captors.
When he took off again, we could usually get one of us close enough to grab him behind the neck and capture him. If we missed his neck, he would clamp that big hard sharp mouth of his down on our finger and it hurt like the dickens.
There’s that big hard sharp mouth of the Collared Lizard that would clamp down on you if you didn’t catch him just right behind the neck.
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When we caught one, we would inspect him closely and play with him for a while and then let him go back to the canyons from whence he came. These guys were a lot harder to catch than the horned toad, so we felt like we had accomplished something special when we got one in our hands.
Thanks for reading The Collared Lizard,
Bill
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