La Ventana Stories

In October, my dad and I enjoy/survive our annual Isla Cerralvo Camping Trip. October is one of the best times to find snakes in our area and — amazingly — this was our third year in a row pulling off a Cerralvo trip during this crazy time of year. 

When we arrived on the beach of the island, spirits were high. We had everything we needed for a great trip. We started setting up camp but then the wind made its Appearance. We brought out our tarps and discovered that they were very old and would rip if you looked at them wrong. 

After a frustrating few hours, we gave up on our tarp fragments and either huddled under our umbrella or stayed in the ocean for the majority of the day. Once the sun started to set, I began exploring the dunes. I found my favorite little junk pile and flipped every bit of metal in hopes of finding the endemic Savage’s Sand Snake (Sonora savagei). 

These little snakes are not easy to find because they spend most of their time below the surface of the sand. However, underneath objects they will come up to enjoy the heat coming through the object, while still being protected from scary day creatures plus have access to their favorite foods such as crickets and scorpions. 

I flipped the entire metal pile and found nothing. I was disappointed until I noticed one more piece of metal underneath the exact center of an extremely extensive and luscious thorn bush. 

I was barefoot as I was not expecting to go thorn diving, but I have experience with thorny areas and bare feet, and I couldn’t miss this opportunity. I shuffled my way on all fours into the mass of vegetation. After a few minutes relocating branches and getting an impressive majority of leaves stuck in my hair, I arrived at the target. I took a deep breath, and flipped it.

Underneath that metal there was a lot of life, including a sand snake! It burrowed underneath the sand, and I started raking with my fingers in the sand with hopes of finding it burrowed underneath. To my surprise, my raking did turn up a sand snake, but this time it was a young one. I was able to grab it, and I kept going to find the other one. Then I noticed a scorpion in the corner. It was a little bit too close, and it was staring at me with the air of an irritated assassin. I recoiled a bit, but then the sand moved, and I extracted the second sand snake. The scorpion left its post and I put the metal down. I was so excited that I almost forgot about the prison of thorns. I made my escape, and I had just found two Savage’s Sand Snakes. 

If you want to read more about our Cerralvo adventure, come read the rest on my free Substack, Beneath The Scales.

At first glance, side-blotched lizards appear to be essentially classic lizards: small, fast and brownish with a bit of blue. Yet these lizards are remarkable in their own ways. My goal this week is to teach you how to identify one — and how to impress your friends by teaching them how to identify one — along with a few fun facts.

There is some debate whether we have here in LV/ES the western or common subspecies, but it doesn’t really matter unless you plan on doing DNA samples. Side-blotched lizards are usually no more than 5 cm (2 in) long, excluding the tail, which is sometimes longer than the lizard itself. Side-blotched lizards are actually somewhat hard to find around here; they aren’t rare, they just seem to live in little pockets of desert, completely avoiding other areas. Just an hour north, however, they become ever present.

If you see a side-blotched lizard, usually you see a little movement, then you stare into the spot where you saw it for a while, then you decide it was nothing and start turning around before the lizard moves again, and stares at you with the superior air of royalty, knowing he’s untouchable. Then it runs deep into the nethers of whatever bush it was sitting next to, and there is no hope of seeing it again. 

Side-blotched lizards have pointy snouts and usually come in shades of grayish brown with lots of little spots of blue, yellow and other colors on their sides and backs. Their tails are most often just gray or slightly blue, and their eyes are black and extraordinarily snobbish, although I may be biased based on the fact that I have never managed to catch one. Somehow they always have an escape route. Anyway, they are gray, have blue spots, except for sometimes they don’t because sometimes they are striped, and sometimes they look just like every other type of lizard. For the sake of this column, we are going to stick with the most common color scheme: gray or brown with spots.

Male side-blotched lizards sometimes sport amazing reds, yellows, blues and oranges, and/or have black spots just behind their front legs. These should be the easiest traits to spot. They seem to love coming out right around the time the sun goes behind the mountains, and I have even seen them at night occasionally. There are some interesting studies about the males of different colors having different mating strategies, somewhat like a rock/paper/scissors match, but I am running out of space, so maybe more on this next time. 

What impresses me most about side-blotched lizards is how adaptable they are. They inhabit some tiny islets with just a few bushes on them; they thrive on the sidewalks of La Paz; and essentially the same lizard can be found all the way up to Washington state! They are definitely impressive lizards, even if they are a bit stuck up.

If you enjoyed this article, please follow me on my Substack, Beneath the Scales. If you would like to join me on a reptile walk, here is a link to my Reptile Walks WhatsApp chat.

Today I am not writing about reptiles because I believe this subject is important. Here in La Ventana/El Sargento, we are at around 24 degrees latitude, and this means we are very close to the tropics. We are lucky, for the most part, that there aren’t too many dangerous creatures in our area. Most of us are familiar with Black Widows and rattlesnakes, but there is one local dangerous insect that many people do not know about, and that is the Kissing Bug.

Kissing bugs are large, blood-sucking insects inhabiting much of Central America. Our local species, Dipetalogaster maxima, is not all that common, but I have seen individuals just outside of town. They are relatively easy to identify, as they are quite large.

The reason these insects are dangerous is because they transmit a disease called Chagas. The disease is not transmitted when they bite, but rather when they poop on you, which is basically whenever they bite. Chagas disease can be deadly. Learn more about it at the CDC.

Luckily, Kissing Bugs are nocturnal and like to inhabit rocky arroyos, so they are not often encountered. They only really feed at night so, as long as you are sleeping in a tent, you should have nothing to fear. 

The moral of this story is: Never sleep outside without a tent in Southern Baja.

If you want to read more reptile-related stories, please subscribe to my Substack page, Beneath The Scales, where I write more in-depth about my favorite topic.