Dodie keeps this in our kitchen window. I don’t know why. Sometimes I forget and for a quick second or two, it scares the jazebus out of me.
In our childhood, we remember playing with real live ones, but they just don’t seem to exist out here in the Hill Country anymore.
A whole generation of Texas kids grew up catching these, and a lot of people under thirty have never seen one alive.
The Texas horned lizard has been the ultimate chill reptile since 1993. It has been the officially designated reptile of the Lone Star State since then, but let’s be honest:
Anyone who grew up here before the 1980s has a tale about scooping one off the driveway like it’s a casual Tuesday. These guys are so laid-back about being picked up, you’d think they were just waiting for the next yoga class!
Instead of running away, their whole defensive strategy is basically a game of hide-and-seek: blend into the dirt and play statue, which works like a charm until someone decides to give them a good old-fashioned staring contest. Good luck with that!
They eat harvester ants, mostly, and that is where the trouble started. Fire ants arrived and pushed the native harvester ants out across enormous stretches of the state, and the pesticides people used to fight the fire ants finished off much of what was left. The lizards lost their food and their habitat at the same time, and they are a threatened species here now.
There are real recovery programs running, and zoos in this state have managed to hatch and release them, which people a few decades ago thought would never work.
The thing everybody wants to know is whether the blood squirting is true. It is. Badly frightened, some of them can rupture small vessels near the eye and shoot blood at whatever is bothering them, which is one of the strangest defenses anywhere in North America.
Did you ever catch one of these as a kid, and do you remember where you were?
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Yes, I caught a few horned lizards while I lived in Levelland, Texas (since I was at the edge of town and more likely to be near red ants).
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