"An adventure isn't worth telling if there aren’t any dragons in it." — Sarah Ban Breathnach

Whether dragons are real depends on your perspective. On the island of Komodo (and adjacent islands) in the Indonesian archipelago, there are giant varanid lizards that eat cattle, deer, and occasionally people. They are dragons. One of its dragon relatives, Megalania, was two to three times larger, lived nearby in Australia, but probably not coincidentally, went extinct about the same time humans arrived.  It was very much a dragon. Still, if you are as small as a side-blotched lizard, living anywhere in the North American deserts, collared lizards are also dragons. 

We have two species of collared lizards dwelling among the rocky hillsides surrounding the Coachella Valley: Great Basin collared lizards to the north and through the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts, and Baja California collared lizards to the south extending down the Peninsular Mountain Range spine of Baja California. Both are stealth hunters that almost fly across boulders to capture side-blotched lizards. Elsewhere, across the deserts of North America, there are an additional four or more species of collared lizards; wherever they reign they are the largest, most voracious predatory lizards, and like dragons everywhere, they are rare. Like the large predatory cats of Africa’s Serengeti Plains, you seldom see collared lizards, but they almost certainly see you.  In contrast, like wildebeest, side-blotched lizards can be common, and like wildebeest to African cats, side-blotched lizards are on the collared lizards’ menu. 

At elevations below 5,000-feet, side-blotched lizards are often abundant, far more so than any other lizard species, and a big reason why they are preferred dragon food. But why, despite being on the menu for collared lizards, are side-blotched lizards so successful? First, they are generalists in both their diet and where they can live. Any insect small enough to fit into their mouth is potential food. Second, they grow fast and will breed before they are a year old. Third, their small size makes them especially efficient thermoregulators, gaining heat rapidly in the morning hours so that they can be out foraging and courting before the much bigger collared lizards warm enough to be active.

Side-blotched lizards have perfected the “short game” strategy: grow fast, breed, and usually die young; it clearly works, as they have the largest range of any lizard in North America. Their strategy makes them quick to respond to environmental change – including climate change. As warmer and drier conditions prevail at lower elevations, side-blotched lizards are increasingly rare, but still present in washes and canyon bottoms where what precious water there is will concentrate and cause there to be more plants and more insects. However, at the upper limits of their distribution, side-blotched lizards are becoming more common and are occupying incrementally higher elevations each year. Other lizard species focus on a mid- to long-game strategy, living longer but only breeding when resources are more abundant. That can work as well, but it is harder to build their populations quickly unless conditions are good for multiple years in a row, which in deserts almost never happens. 

Collared lizards are one of those long-game species. They focus on getter large with a disproportionately big, dragon-like head (the better to eat smaller lizards). Their genus name, Crotaphytus, means “head of the hammer." They can leap as much as three times their body length, almost giving the impression of flying, and so cementing their dragon credentials. If I were ever given the freedom to design trail signs for our local mountains, I would somewhere add the phrase, “Here be dragons, let your adventure begin."

Nullius in verba

Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe.