You can tell this pretty lizard is a female by the bright orange spots on her neck.
Holding a wild animal in your hand is not something most people get to experience. It can be anywhere from thrilling to kind of terrifying (I’ve met some fierce chipmunks in the past). This summer, I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on the rare Sand Dune Lizard (Sceloporus arenicolus).
With these little guys, we spend a lot more time chasing them around the sand dunes than actually holding them. They’re very elusive, and if you lose track of one you’ve sighted, it’s gone. These are the options for catching one: slip a tiny, tiny noose around its neck, snatch and grab, pounce, dig it out of a hole, or the more civilized pitfall trap. However it happens, it’s pretty exciting to catch one, and every lizard we catch helps protect the habitat from oil & gas drilling.
Not all of my time in Roswell is spent playing the lizard rodeo game, though. My fellow intern, Mary, and I have been lucky enough to have a great mentor who allows us a lot of flexibility with our projects. In addition to catching lizards, we’ve been involved in maintaining wildlife waters, monitoring vegetation after a big fire, checking out reclaimed oil pads, making recommendations for antelope passes along pasture fences, and more. Most recently, we’ve been in a three-office effort to reclaim an oil pad by planting a lot of sand bluestem in the desert. This involved some seriously hard labor, but it has been a lot of fun to get together with the interns from the Carlsbad and Las Cruces offices.
So, this is my favorite story from the summer so far. Mary and I had been learning about pronghorn antelope, and how they travel between pastures. Apparently, pronghorns like to duck under fences, not jump over, so to create antelope passes in long fence lines, a four-strand barbed wire fence with a smooth bottom strand is recommended. One day, Mary and I are driving along in the middle of nowhere and a pronghorn races across the road in front of us. I turn around to watch it and see it go flying up over a fence… and then come crashing down head over heels on the other side.
Help!
We do a quick turnaround, and sure enough, its front hoof is tangled in the top two strands of barbed wire. We approach it pretty carefully, but that hoof is really stuck between the tight wires. Obviously we couldn’t just leave it there, so we broke out the gloves and a piece of rebar and somehow managed to pry the wire apart just enough for our friend to slip his hoof out and run away. After a few steps, the pronghorn stopped and looked back. We’re pretty sure he was saying thank you.
Carolyn Livensperger, Roswell, NM