PLANO COURIER (Texas) 09 September 06 Childhood friend, the horny toad, now a threatened species (Jim Dunlap)
A construction foreman working at a site in West Texas noticed a slight movement in the red clay sand. A closer look revealed a tiny creature that brought back childhood memories. Thinking of his children here in Plano, he picked up the tiny animal, put it in a box, and brought it home. The small creature was a baby Texas horned lizard.
If you are of a certain age, growing up in this part of Texas, you will remember having to dodge the horned toad while playing baseball in a vacant lot, or picking it up in the flowerbed around your house. My brother and I tried to keep a "horny toad" in a makeshift cage until Mother made us let it go. Horned toads were so plentiful 40 or 50 years ago that we used to catch them and mail them to our "Yankee" cousins.
The creature that looks like a miniature prehistoric monster has all but disappeared from areas of Texas where it was once plentiful. It can still be found in our area, although it is not as common as it once was in populated areas. You could probably spend your whole life in Plano now and never see one. It is more plentiful in West Texas.
The horned toad is not a toad at all, but a lizard with the face of a toad. Lizards are reptiles and thus are cold-blooded and have scales. The Texas horned toad is one of the three species of horned lizards in the state.
The favored food of this little reptile is ants, especially harvester (red) ants, and although it may eat other insects such as beetles, ants are necessary for proper digestion. It gets water from dew.
It enjoys semi-desert and sandy locations but also can be found in low-lying areas, as well as 10,000 feet in altitude. As the sun goes down it buries itself in the warm sand, and in the autumn it spends more time buried. In the winter, it goes into a torpid state.
The horned toad has few natural enemies because of its horned exterior. Snakes sometimes eat them but may pay with their lives because the horns can penetrate the wall of the snake's gullet. As a defense mechanism, it can puff up and then flatten out alternately to make itself look bigger. You may have heard that a horned toad can excrete blood from its eyes. I can confirm this. This defense mechanism is thought to be an irritant to the eyes of small mammals.
There are two theories about where the horned toad has gone. One is that we have built so many new lakes that the humidity has been raised to levels that are incompatible with the lizard's physiology. The other theory is that excessive use of insecticides to rid us of ants has caused the ants to build up a tolerance for the poison and the horned toads have died after eating the ants. Ironically, if there were more horned toads around, they would control the ant population and eliminate the need for insecticides.
The decline in the population of the Texas horned lizard in many parts of the state has resulted in a classification of "threatened species," and it is now protected under state law.
The baby horned lizard was brought to the Center by Mom and the kids because it became lethargic and would not eat. When they were informed that the horned toad could not be kept in captivity under state law, we were happy to find out that the husband was headed back to the same construction site the next week. I am glad to report that the little "horny toad" is now back home in West Texas doin' whatever it was it was doing.
Childhood friend, the horny toad, now a threatened species