Texas Monthly: My Quest to Find the Elusive, Two-Foot-Long Texas Alligator Lizard
By Asher Elbein, Texas Monthly
On a warm spring morning a few years ago, I ducked into a rock shelter on Austin’s Barton Creek Greenbelt while taking a walk. Sunlight cut through the live oaks and painted the walls of the limestone canyons. Only as I stood up to leave did I see it: a slender, serpentine lizard sitting on a ledge, its armored back banded in orange and white, its narrow face and glittering eyes set in an expression of faint distaste.
Wild lizards don’t like to be seen, but the Texas alligator lizard (Gerrhonotus infernalis) has elevated elusiveness to an art form. Arguably one of the most distinctive Texas reptiles, it’s found across the Hill Country, particularly in the heavily trafficked trails near Austin’s urban core. But it’s famously tough to spot. Before that chance encounter, I’d spent years walking the capital’s trails in search of the alligator lizard but never once laid eyes on one. That mixture of strangeness and secrecy makes it something of a hidden gem. “They’re just cool-looking,” says Paul Crump, a herpetologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife. “They’re weird and big. The challenge of finding them is really neat.”
Texas alligator lizards are the largest lizards in the state, maxing out at around two feet long. They get their name from their scaly armor, which stretches across their bodies in a pattern of brown, orange, and white, like a tightly woven basket. While they do have a scattered Lone Star State range, Crump says—mostly turning up in the karst landscapes of the Edwards Plateau and in cooler canyons and hillsides as far west as Big Bend—the “Texas” part of the name is a misnomer: most of the species’ population is actually found in the canyons and highlands of Mexico.
A Texas alligator lizard in Big Bend National Park. Dukas/Universal Images Group via Getty
An accident of biology has left alligator lizards with a deceptively malevolent stare, and they can deliver powerful nips if handled roughly. But they are animals deeply committed to minding their own business. While their habit of sustained eye contact is somewhat unusual among lizards, their intense, glittering gaze is that of a reptile that wants nothing more than for anyone looking at them to go away. Generally, they work hard not to be seen at all. Most other lizards tend to betray themselves by scampering away when nervous or basking in direct sunlight to warm up; alligator lizards do neither. “When you don’t really understand how to look for them, they can be difficult to find” even if you know generally where they are, says Corey Fielder, a research associate at the Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute, in College Station. Surprisingly for an animal with such short limbs, they are excellent—if exceedingly slow and meticulous—climbers and prefer to spend most of their time in deep cover, tucked up in “nasty, thick” tangled brush around limestone cliffs.
This secretive nature means they’ve tended to escape sustained scientific scrutiny, Fielder says. Researchers have long had a general sense that they’re most active around spring and fall and overwinter in deep cracks in the rock. Beyond that, their habits have generally been mysterious. As a graduate student, Fielder chose to use radio trackers to nail down their activities. This proved tricky: The lizards’ habit of squeezing through crevices and tight tangles of brush scraped off most of Fielder’s early trackers. After finally finding a design that worked, Fielder spent months following the lizards around Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve, near Johnson City, trying to figure out what they were up to.
For most of the year, the answer was: not much. The lizards spent the winter in holes in the limestone cliffs, creeping out on sunny days to warm themselves and fully emerging in the spring to lay eggs. In the summer, Fielder found, they spent almost all of their time off the ground, moving between brush piles, thickets, and shrubs within a single square foot. Mostly, they sat quietly on thin branches, waiting for something interesting and edible—an insect, or a small lizard—to pass by.
Despite their general stillness, alligator lizards can be voracious eaters, says Ryan Collister, organizer of the Central Texas Herpetological Society and an enthusiast of the species. There are numerous (if apocryphal) claims of them eating nestling birds, and one team of researchers studying cave crickets found a pair of alligator lizards posted up outside a cave, picking off the insects as they emerged in the evening. They do have standards, Collister says: His captive ones showed zero interest in snails and “acted very offended” when he tried to give them an earthworm.
Their couch potato lifestyle comes to an abrupt end in the fall mating season. Around mid-September, male alligator lizards suddenly abandon their arboreal ways, wandering far and wide in search of love. In October and November, Fielder found, males often cover more ground than in the entire rest of the year combined. Hormones can make them testy: Males that have spent most of the year in solitary meditation sometimes get into genuinely nasty fights over females, or follow them around for a while after mating to run off any other potential suitors.
Most people who run into alligator lizards do so during these fall wanderings. For the rest of the year, you need a keen eye and excellent luck. I decided to try and summon some up in mid-April, meeting Collister and another herpetologist, Elijah Wostl, on a cool morning at Austin’s Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, by West Lake Hills. We trooped out of the sun-drenched parking lot and onto the dappled trails, pausing now and then to examine tangles of brush or shrubs.
“At first I was like, ‘They must be crazy rare.’ I was having such a hard time,” Collister recalled as we eyeballed a likely-looking shrub (no luck). After a friend showed him one on the greenbelt, he started to get a sense of what to look for: the dull orange of a regrown tail, the slightly sinister glitter of an eye, or the mottled gray of a shiny belly. Alligator lizards, he explained, tend to hang out on surprisingly slender branches and twigs for their size, making a slight S shape, like a rubber snake toy. Learn the type of habitat they like and what they look like when at rest, and they become much easier to spot, he told me. “I don’t believe most people when they talk to me about how hard they are to find,” Collister said, laughing. “Like, ‘I dunno, man. Get good.’ ”
Over the next few hours, we climbed and picked our way along brushy cliff edges at Wild Basin, shouldering through thick brush hanging over the edges of steep drops or slipping down to the bases of rock overhangs overshadowed by boughs. All are classic alligator lizard spots, Collister said. They were also empty. Doubly determined after striking out, we drove over to Barton Creek, where Collister has recorded the majority of his sightings. It was a good day for reptiles: Spiky-scaled Texas spiny lizards observed us warily from the trees; long-tailed ground skinks and their larger, fatter cousins, four-lined skinks, were out sunning themselves, shining like burnished copper in the sunlight. A tiny pair of tree lizards chased and postured at each other, flashing blue patches beneath skin like living bark. Of alligator lizards, there was no sign.
It was a humbling experience for everyone. “There’s probably one laughing at us right now,” Collister said ruefully, the confidence from earlier in the day demolished. “But then, that’s usually true.”
There is some reason to believe that alligator lizard numbers may be dropping a bit within the city, Collister added. Some in the reptile community are worried that the lizards are being overcollected for the pet trade, because there’s no legal limit on them. Collister is a bit skeptical that this is the main reason for any decline, but it certainly doesn’t help. What he considers more likely is that the larger environmental shifts happening in the Hill Country are having an effect. Alligator lizards prefer somewhat cooler temperatures than many other lizards, and it’s possible that a dramatic change in forest shade is enough to knock them back a bit. In recent years, the climatic whipsaw between deep drought and sharp freezes has knocked out many of the bigger trees at Barton Creek, Collister noted, opening up the canopy and allowing non-native vegetation like nandina and ligustrum to explode and take over.
On the other hand, Crump tells me later, alligator lizards do still seem to be reasonably common within their Austin range, and they are, up to a point, surprisingly tolerant of urban life. Their preference for steep cliffsides has thus far protected them from the worst of development, and, as Collister points out, they’re quite prolific for lizards, producing one to two clutches of between fifteen and thirty eggs a year. It may simply be that—even for quite accomplished alligator-lizard spotters—they’re just very tricky to find.
On the other hand, the challenge is what makes it fun. To find an alligator lizard, you have to engage with nature in a different way: slowly, methodically, eyes alert for the little details, in the full knowledge that even parkland not far from a city center might have a secret creature lurking in an unassuming bit of shrubbery. “It kind of blows people’s minds that they’re right next to all these busy urban trails,” Collister says.
A few days after searching with Collister, I headed back out to Barton Creek with a herpetologist friend. We stalked slowly along the shaded cliffside, examining every crack, eyeballing every likely-looking shrub. Despite our efforts, the ghost of the greenbelt did not appear. But I could feel—or imagined I felt—little glittering eyes on us as we went, peering out of the shadowed branches, their owners secure in the knowledge that we would eventually leave, and the thickets would belong to them once more.
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Originally shared by Texas Monthly