Texas Spiny Lizard

About the Texas Spiny Lizard

The Texas Spiny Lizard is the big, rough-scaled gray-brown lizard of tree trunks and fence posts across South and Central Texas - up to eleven inches long with the tail, patterned in wavy dark crossbands that blend perfectly into bark. Males show narrow blue patches along the belly edges. Unlike the Crevice Spiny Lizard of the rock canyons it has no black collar, and it lives in trees rather than cliffs.

It is a superb climber and a shy one: a Texas Spiny Lizard on a mesquite trunk will sidle around to the far side as you approach and keep the tree between you and it, and if pressed it rockets up into the branches. It hunts insects on the trunk and in the leaf litter below and basks head-up in dappled sun. Females lay several clutches of eggs through the warm months.

In Texas it is common from the Rio Grande Valley north through the Hill Country and east toward the coast, in mesquite brush, oak mottes, riverside woodland, and older neighborhoods with big trees - the lizard you hear scrabble up the bark just before you spot it.