We Love The Stars Too Fondly

It’s 12:44 and 88º – do you know where your lizard is?

Do you want to play the game? Do you want to look? Go ahead. I’ll put some spoiler space in here for you.

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While the lizards love the sun, they more like just being warm, and if that wooden edging piece is in the full sunlight it gets toasty, so they can snuggle up against it and hug it like a giant body pillow, sucking up infrared photons through their little, blue bellies.

Which means they can hid in the shade.

With their little heads poking out over the edge to keep an eye out for hungry predators.

You can see in the other photos that the roots of the big tree are just a couple inches behind him. As soon as I twitched, he was off the edging and onto that big root, where he blended in almost perfectly. Another twitch by me and he as climbing up the tree and making his escape.

That’s how you get to be a six-inch lizard or a ten-inch lizard instead of a two-inch “popcorn” hatchling.

A couple of days ago, near sunset, as I was taking trash out to where the bins are on the side of the garage, I noticed a single thread of spider silk floating overhead. It was connected to the garage room about 10 feet up, the other end anchored about 15 feet up to the Italian cypress trees next to the driveway. Along the line I could see a single large-ish spider working. I’m no expert on spiders by any means, but I think it’s an orb weaver?

Today when I was heading out to get groceries I went to look and see what might have been built up there, lit up by the early morning Sun.

It’s been moderately windy here for the last couple of days, so the web must be pretty sturdy to not get torn apart by either the tugging of those cypress trees as they sway in the wind or from the wind itself.

The circular portion of the web here is about three feet across, roughly the size of a trash can lid.

While orb weavers are reluctant to bite and their venom is mostly mild and harmless to humans, my biggest concern is having a web like this built at head level, not 15 feet overhead. If I blindly walk into this in the dark while taking the trash out at night, then A) I’m going to be flailing and making dance moves that have never before been seen by man, and; B) I’m going to pull every muscle in my body doing so.

It won’t be pretty.

The instinctive engineering skills portrayed here are amazing. Having acknowledged that, let’s agree to keep to our separate spaces. I won’t destroy hours of your work and significant amounts of your resources which you’re using to feed yourself, and you won’t scare the shit out of me at random times.

Good talk!

Do you see it? It’s a teeny, tiny little thing. From snout to back legs is maybe an inch – add in the tail and it might be two.

I’ve said it before, but I don’t remember ever having so many lizards hatching so late in the year. I’ve always seen the babies, the little ones, in the spring. Maybe in the early summer at the latest. Not this year.

Dr. Earyn McGee, of the famous “FindThatLizard” weekly Twitter events which I so dearly love, called these tiny guys “popcorn” lizards. Their main function in the universe is to be food for other critters and bigger lizards.

A few make it and get bigger. And I understand they need to be bigger to have the reserves needed to make it through the winter when they become dormant.

They become dormant in the winter because it gets cold and wet. Maybe they know something we don’t?