Reptiles of California's Coachella Valley

Another gecko, but this time it's a local!   This is the San Diego sub-species of the Western banded gecko, which I encountered during one otherwise unmemorable night of wandering around with a flashlight in the Coachella Valley Preserve.   Check out its outsized eyelashes, a necessary adaptation for keeping blowing desert sand and grit out of your eyes.

Here's a male and a female with more "typical" markings.   The male on the left has a very pronounced blotch on its side as well as blue dots on its back, but the female looks fairly drab.   Although they're very common, they're also quite small and wary so it's difficult to get close enough to get good photographs.

How wude!

This is a juvenile zebra tailed lizard which I came across in the Coachella Valley Nature Preserve, it has the very obvious zebra striped tail of the adults, but it lacks the distinctive belly colors of either the mature male or female.

Again the tail is used as a way of distracting dangerous predators like myself from the main course - the lizard's head, body and legs.   They run across the sand at high speed and flash their tail as they go, perhaps as a distraction to hawks and other birds.

Here's another photo of that female.   Adult males also look quite striking, with the same zebra tail, a blue underbelly and even a colored pouch under the throat.   Interestingly, in this shot you can see this lizard raising its feet off the ground and resting on its heels, a piece of behavior which helps the lizard keep a minimum of its body on the hot sand, and therefore helps it to keep its cool in temperatures which regularly exceed 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees celcius) during Summer.

Of course it's sometimes easier to photograph the males of the species than the females, since the males often come out and do a little display of aggression, which usually involves doing rapid up-and-down pushups.   This might be a juvenile male, its blue markings are certainly a lot less pronounced than some of the others I saw.   Both sexes live mostly on insects and other arthropods including scorpions, which seems like a risky thing for such a small and delicate looking lizard to tackle!

Enough of dinky little lizards!

One of my favorite lizards when I moved to the desert was this desert iguana.   Not only are they a nice size, they also have nice patterns and coloration on their back and tail.

They're mostly herbivores but they will eat the occasional insect, and since one of their favorite foods is creosote bush, they're usually found only where those bushes grow.   They'll climb up into the bushes to eat the leaves and flowers.

Desert iguanas are the exact opposites of the sagebrush lizards, they're the most heat tolerant of any lizard in the United States, and you'll see them in the middle of the day when all the other reptiles have sought shelter from the sun.

Here's an adolescent desert iguana, starting to develop the rich colors and patterns of an adult.   Although they're fairly easy to recognize, the main distinguishing feature is actually the slightly raised row of scales down its back, which is visible even on lizards too young to have developed much coloration, such as the juvenile desert iguana I photographed in Nevada's Valley of Fire.

Another cool looking lizard, this time living in the boulder strewn Tahquitz valley, just five minutes out of downtown Palm Springs.   This type of rocky habitat is the only place you'll find such lizards, and these environmental preferences together with the dark line around its neck led to its common name, the banded rock lizard.

Banded rock lizards have fairly flat bodies so they can squeeze between rocks and into crevices, and their long claws allow them not only to walk with ease up vertical walls, but even to walk on the undersides of overhangs.

The orange coloration on the throat and above the eyes of this individual marks it as a gravid female, meaning a female which is carrying eggs.   In America's south-west, orange coloration often seems to be more associated with female lizards than males, which have a stronger tendency to have bright blue coloration.

Here's the same individual from a different angle.   These lizards are somewhat shy, but by moving in very slowly I was able to take a lot of photographs, and get to within a couple of feet of it.   This is all the more surprising since it was in shadow, forcing me to use flash every time I took a photograph.   It probably felt a bit more confident because it had several escape routes close to hand.

This is a different granite spiny lizard.

They're said to have a temperament to match their well armored appearance, apparently they're quite inclined to bite if you pick them up!

I love the green colored scales, to me it somehow doesn't seem that lizards like this should have green scales, so it makes them all the more fascinating.

And if the green scales are a sight to behold, then how about these brilliant deep blue scales on the underside of this adult male!

Despite repeated bouts of supposedly aggressive push up calisthenics, this guy wouldn't let me get within 30 feet, so I was forced to take this shot using a very long lens.

Spiny is one thing, but how about horny?

This is a desert horned lizard, one of the most interesting lizards you can encounter in the valley.   I didn't see very many of them while I was there, but I did come across a couple of them in the Coachella Valley Preserve beyond the springs.

It's quite possible that I walked right past some during my excursions into the desert, because as you can see their coloration makes them very difficult to observe against the background, and their tendency to lie completely still until you're almost stepping on them makes it even less likely that you'll see them.

A face only a mother can love.   The horns, the flat front and the mouth almost hidden at the bottom of the head all give it an ungainly appearance.   However there is one admirer in this photo - if you look up from the back end of its eye you'll see a small, slightly pinkish lump next to one of the horns.   This is a tick which is sucking blood from the lizard; you can see another one in the previous photo, actually sitting on one of the horns on the other side of its head.

They might not be aggressive, but I don't take my chances, and even in the heat of summer I wear high rubber boots because they offer complete psychological protection against snakebite!   It's not that I expect a snake to start chasing me across the desert, it's just that it's very easy to step within striking distance of a snake without knowing it.   On evening I was walking up a ridge not far from where I saw the other rattlesnake and suddenly this individual started rattling at me, which is a good thing since I was only 3 or 4 feet away and it was right in the middle of the path I was walking up.   Once again the snake beat a hasty retreat into a bush, so this is the only photo I got of it.

Of course there aren't any cobras in the United States, but it still put on a convincing show and it might have been only my imagination, but it even looked like it was flattening the front part of its body in order to appear larger.   The place where I found this snake was within walking distance of my home, but it was about to be developed for a new housing development.   I'd seen nothing but ants all night so I was very glad to stumble across it, and so I took several dozen photos.   This shot shows its cat-like eyes and the enlarged scale above its mouth which allows it to push down into the sand in search of its prey and also provides it with its name.