Day 2 of Arizona backyard photography.
For today we have another silhouetted animal, this time a lizard. Caught another lizard feeding on some rotting watermelon. These lizards are quite skittish and even movement at this distance will scare them off so I had to do some long distance ID for this one. Based on the color of the head and some of the patterning I’m guessing it is a desert spiny lizard which can have some quite brilliant scale coloring. The linked source indicates that females will have reddish/orangish heads during breeding season. Also apparently they can change color from light to darker to aid in the absorption (dark color) or reflection of light (light color).
In the deserts of Arizona most of the little rainfall they receive comes during the monsoon season. I’ll post about this later but this season brings out the paloverde root borer which is a member of the longhorn family of beetles and one of the largest beetles in North America. As the common name suggests, the larvae (grubs) feed primarily on the Mexican palo verde trees but will feed on other non-native trees as well. Despite their rather fierce looking mandibles (jaw, mouth parts) they seem to be vegetarian.
Cacti can be as difficult to identify as most other plants. A lot of details such as the number of folds, number of needles, how the needles are clustered, etc. distinguish different species. If you manage to catch it in flower you’ll have an easier time, unfortunately I seemed to have missed that event. All that aside, I’m pretty confident that I have a picture of a saguaro cactus with a hole in it. Saguaro’s can live for up to 200 years and many reach over 40 feet in height. They start producing flowers around the age of 55, which are borne at the tops of the ‘arms’ and main stem. The flowers bloom at night and are pollinated by birds, bats, and other insects. Some may have holes in them that may have been created by birds such as Gila Woodpecker and the Gilded Flicker for nesting. I’ll have more on cacti in later posts, but you can also see a fruit of a prickly pear type cactus.
phototerrascientia 