Spiny

I walked by the back door today, and I saw the big mamma jamma lizard laying on the back porch getting some sun. I call him this because he’s the size of a carrot. He’s also different from your typical garden-variety lizard. He looks like a slender horny toad, with spiky scales that are gray, black, and white. We have at least two of these lizards living on our back porch, because there’s a smaller version, which I assume is the female.

I called Troy to come look at him, because like me, he’s enamored with nature. As we stared at him through the glass door, Troy said, “I love this lizard! He looks like a dragon. I want to hold him.” I tried to explain that we couldn’t hold him because he was scared of us. To him, we looked like monsters. To which Troy replied, “I’m not a monster.” I laughed. “I know that, Baby, but he doesn’t.”

Feeling like the lizard deserved better than to be called “the big mamma jamma lizard” all the time, I decided to see if I could find out what kind of lizard he was. I was rewarded to find out that he’s a Texas Spiny Lizard. His coloring is camouflage to help him blend in to the bark of trees, which he’s fond of climbing. And apparently males also have two blue stripes down the sides of their bellies. They are also generally shy and nervous, choosing to avoid contact whenever possible. But the most interesting fact we read was that when one male is confronted by another, they don’t fight. Instead, they engage in a push-up challenge, where one lizard is declared the winner when the other one can no longer do a push-up!

Troy didn’t care about any of this. He just wanted to touch the lizard. He’s a very hands-on experience kind of guy. And then I realized that the lizard was staring straight at us through the glass. I got this eerie feeling of being the “monster” on display in the cage, rather than the other way around. With our faces pressed up against the glass, we probably looked like caged animals too. Realizing that I was never going to open the door, Troy wandered off to see something else. After a few more seconds of looking at the hideous beast inside the house, the lizard also wandered off to catch an unsuspecting bug in the grass.