Sagebrush lizards

My grandson Daxon is a piece of work. If he isn't building huge paper airliners out of life-sized newspaper sheets, he's coming into the house shouting, "Hey, Grandpa, look what I caught!" And the best part of that wonderful cry is after we've all oohed and ahhed over it, he puts it back exactly where he found it.

Daxon and family came over from Salem a week or so back and we got into a lizard discussion. Daxon asked if we had sagebrush lizards in our back 2.5 acres of sagebrush and juniper. I said I thought we did, but had never seen one.

"Why don't you go out and find one," I suggested. And he did. No longer than 20 minutes later he came back with a beautiful teenage female sagebrush lizard carefully tucked between thumb and finger.

You know what happened next, all the other kids jumped up and started shouting, "I wanna see, I wanna see!" Then they all wanted to go out back and catch one. But they sat quietly when I said one was enough, leave the others in peace, and they did. But I put some sugar in it by asking them to take some time to "watch" them, and keep track of what they eat by writing it up in their journals.

If you don't know our sagebrush lizards the way you'd like to and you don't have a copy of Al St. John's field guide, "Reptiles of the Northwest," read on. If you want to see a copy of Al's marvelous field guide, after you finish this story, head for your favorite library, or get one of your very own in your favorite bookstore.

Al's been sneaking up on snakes since he was about 8 years old. He grew up over in The Swamp in McMinnville, and when he was about 15 years old he got himself bitten on the end of his finger by a Northern Pacific rattlesnake he was reaching for under a rock near his home. That's when he was baptized - so to speak.

In the event you can't get out to the library or buy his book, what follows may be enough about sagebrush lizards to hold you till you have Al's book. To begin with, sagebrush lizards closely resemble fence lizards, and a quick look may confuse you. Both are about the same size, and have keeled scales on their back, but the sagebrush has smaller scales and is marked different with lines, while the fence lizard has a lines and blotched pattern, and adult sagebrush lizards are grayish to light brown or yellowish in color.

The main (ground) color is broken by a lighter gray or tan stripe running down the center of the back and two lighter stripes, one on either side of the lizard (dorsolateral stripes). You may also see some that have orange markings on the sides.

While the sagebrush lizard prefers open country where they skitter about beneath their name-sake plant, fence lizards prefer rocky habitat, but saying that, both overlap each other where habitats overlap. Out at Peter Myers' place between Sisters and Bend he has sagebrush lizards in his sagebrush and juniper habitat, and fence lizards running up and down the sides of his barn where they live in small piles of rock beside it.

Peter also has an American kestrel nesting box on the side of a picturesque old juniper, which housed a family of kestrels last year, causing his fence lizards to panic most of the daylight hours. When a kestrel is out to start a family the male captures a lizard, stuffs it into his mouth and goes flitting about the nesting box neighborhood shouting/cacking, "Here I am ladies, and look what a handsome hunter I am," which works every time. Then the lizards have a real problem; they are the main prey-base for kestrels.

True to its common name, the sagebrush lizard prefers to live in sagebrush, but is also found in pine and fir forests, redwood forests, brushlands, and juniper woodlands. They are often found sunning on logs or rock outcroppings, and spend most of their time on the ground, although they can and will climb trees to escape predators.

One of the most interesting places you can find them in Sisters Country is within the open area of the Deschutes Land Trust's (DLT) Metolius Preserve. There's an open meadow surrounded by pine and juniper that was once a picnic area for the Sisters residents of the Brooks-Scanlon Timber Company of Bend. Not only is it delightful habitat for sagebrush lizards, but a good-sized group of pigmy horned lizards thrive in the preserve as well.

And there you have all the lizard's major problems for survival: loss of habitat due to recreation, agriculture, intensive grazing, aerial spraying of insecticide, and increased new residential development in common habitats. That's what makes DLT the heroes of wildlife. Once they lay their hands on a piece of ground it is saved for native wildlife habitat forever. If the lizards knew it and could do it, they'd buy a box of candies for Amanda Egertson, DLT'S Steward Director, on her birthday.