Reptile Supervisor Bradley Lawrence guest-blogs on ZooHoo!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (like our state reptile was during the winter months), you know how much we love Texas horned lizards here at the Dallas Zoo. Last weekend we began our 10th year of studying “horny toads” at the Rolling Plains Quail Research Ranch in Fisher Co, Texas.
The population in this area of Texas is very healthy, and we have been monitoring them for 9 years now. We are gathering as much data as we can to help us learn what makes a habitat like this so good for horned lizards. We hope to use what we learn to help conserve these fabulous reptiles both in the wild and in our care here at the Dallas Zoo.
Over the next several months, we’ll be providing up-to-date notes from the field to give y’all a first-hand look at what we do. I hope that you will learn more about the Texas horned lizard as well as how they fit into the bigger ecological picture here in Texas.
The RPQRR is a 4700-acre ranch about 4 hours west of Dallas. Along with horned lizards, we get to experience a rare glimpse of wild Texas that is more and more difficult to find these days.
We start our lizard season in late April or early May, giving them a chance to wake up from their roughly 5 month hibernation. Once they’re awake they start looking for much needed food and also start to think about finding a mate.
We had a very productive first outing. We saw several very healthy looking horned lizards, even though we fought Mother Nature a bit. Spring weather in the rolling plains of Texas can be unpredictable and a little scary.
Stay tuned! We’ll give you more in a couple of weeks.
Recent Comments