Wildlife, sport and activities, sometimes all at once

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the April 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.)

They have a taste for bearded ladies and choke opponents ten times their size. They don't like being watched. Although their relatives shoot blood from the eyes when necessary, they prefer hopping and - in a pinch - stabbing.

They're not psychotic, or even violent. Desert horned lizards (two-and-a-half to six inches long, including the tail) just refuse to be swallowed by a world of giant predators.

The nickname "horny toads" and scientific name Phrynosoma platyrhinos (in Greek, phrynos or "toad," soma or "body," platys or "flat," and rhinos or "nose") refer not to social or amphibious inclinations but to horned lizards' spiny scales, the horns protruding from their skulls, and their flat, wide bodies. All three characteristics help horned lizards give the jaws of death a toothache.

In Inyo and Mono counties, desert horned lizards have an appetizer's chance of winning a race against a much larger roadrunner, coyote, hawk, or leopard lizard. Depending on the predator, lizard escape strategies include bluffing, fleeing, or freezing and relying on a flat body and camouflaged skin to blend in.

If a con job seems promising, a cornered horned lizard may hiss, bite, hop, charge, or emphasize its size by inflating or rotating.

"If a horned lizard sees a roadrunner approaching, it faces the bird head on, exposing as much surface area to the attacker as possible," observes Wyman Meinzer in The Roadrunner. Roadrunners will attack a fleeing lizard, but faced with a pivoting (and don't forget thorny) lizard, the roadrunner may seek faster food elsewhere.

If bluffing fails, unpalatability helps. Desert horned lizards have lost the ability of others in the horned genus to squirt blood when slipping into - or from - a coyote's jaws. However, they can inflate themselves and orient the horns at the bases of their skulls to frustrate, prod, puncture, or - at worst - choke a mouse, roadrunner, or snake.

Occasionally the strategy flops.

"Rattlesnakes are sometimes found dead with the horns of their victim, a half-swallowed horned lizard, protruding through the walls of their throats," Wade Sherbrooke writes in Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America.

If being eaten is a concern, eating is another. Desert horned lizards prefer to eat Pogonomyrmex californicus, "bearded" harvester ants that forage alone and are small enough to fit inside a horned lizard's open jaws.

Eating solitary ants reduces the likelihood of being mobbed by venomous ants. The horned lizard's sit-and-wait hunting strategy, however, requires enough time to find a bellyful of prey. Worse, good ants in small packages carry bad worms in smaller packages: parasitic nematodes hitchhike into horned lizards' stomachs by concealing themselves inside the ants.

Combine these puzzles with the gymnastics required for a lizard to obtain water, to stay warm or cool enough, and to evade pet traders and automobile tires (freeze strategies work poorly), and it's easy to understand why observing horned lizards in the Eastern Sierra occasionally only requires standing on a warm dirt road and waiting for one to seek shelter beneath your sneakers.

Sometimes a flexible sole is the best spot between a rock and a hard place.