I was unexpectedly able to take a few days off this past week so of course I immediately took off for the San Diego back country to do some exploration and searching for herps and other interesting things. (not exactly immediately as my wife had a little list of things to accomplish first...
) I have broken the pics down into several posts to help out the bandwidth-constrained…
My first day was Thursday, August 14th and with much excitement I watched as a large group of thunderheads started to build over the mountains and desert. I checked the NOAA stations and at 6:00 PM it was pouring rain in Ocotillo, apparently it was a good sized thunderstorm producing a lot of rain so I thought the prospects looked good, loaded the truck with some provisions, waited until it started getting dark and took off for a look to see if the rain had brought anything out. Arrived in Ocotillo around 10:00 PM and it was HOT, still way over 100, there was plenty of evidence of the rainstorm, large standing pools of water right in town and lots of debris on the sides of the road and since I was there anyway I decided to drive up hwy S2 to Borrego Springs to see what there was to see. Well, as luck (or lack thereof) would have it, the storms apparently didn't take the same track as the road as I saw no evidence of recent rain once I was a few miles north of Ocotillo and the temps were certainly prohibitive to finding herps. I did find one interesting thing on S2, something I had never seen before, I was about 20 miles out from Ocotillo when I spotted a lizard on the road, immediately thought it was a Gecko, stopped and got out and much to my surprise I found the following, on the road at 10:45 PM!
The Desert Iguana (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) is usually a diurnal species, very heat tolerant and tied closely to the Creosote bush in the Southwestern deserts. This is the first one I have ever found on the road at night. It was a juvenile, was flat against the pavement and ran like the wind once it realized what was going on.
I drove the rest of S2 to Scissors Crossing to Yaqui pass and into Borrego Springs without so much as another hint of a herp, no DOR’s, nothing, the heat was obviously too much for all. I arrived in Borrego Springs a little after midnight and decided to take one quick pass east on Hwy. S22 for a few miles, right at the Borrego Springs airport I ran into a convention of Colorado Desert Sidewinders (Crotalus cerastes laterorepens), found 3 of them within 5 minutes of one another, all of them were flattened out on the road, absorbing heat (or perhaps waiting for the next flight out…) and the air temp was still 92.
I also found one HUGE California Toad (Bufo boreas halophilus) hoping across the road in 90 degree heat, that was it for the night however, 235 miles before I reached home, however I wasn’t skunked and there were still 3 more full days to go!
CONTINUED…
