young spiny lizard: not the brightest bulb in the box

As the election approaches (slowly), my local newspaper has switched to an all-border-all-the-time format. As you might imagine, people an hour's drive from the border are pretty worked up about it, as evidenced by the 311 comments elicited by this article about a woman who lost part of one finger climbing a border fence. While I think I learned in those comments that there are some Mexicans who believe California, Arizona, and Texas rightfully belong to them, the upshot is that I think it's about time for me to stop reading the news again for a while. Thus I will likely be heaping bloggerly scorn elsewhere, such as the local wildlife.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit that there is a short border fence around my back yard, so in my anti-border-fence stance, I'm a huge hypocrit. Anyway, the metal parts of my fence have chicken wire threaded through them so as to contain a previous resident, who I believe was a Boston terrier. Anyway, I expect it would probably stop a javelina, and maybe a cottontail rabbit, but I was pretty sure everything else could go over or through it without much difficulty until we spotted this beastie:


Based on the picture at the bottom of this page, I'm pretty sure that's a juvenile desert spiny lizard. It appeared to be well and truly stuck with its spiny scales lifted to catch on the wire if it tried to back up, but it turns out all we had to do was let it rest a bit so it could yank itself out, run down the fence a little, and stuff itself into a different hole. It eventually moved far enough along the fence that it got to cinderblocks, which it just climbed over.


I can't say for sure, but I think I'm not the only one who learned something today.