Mandie Hilger and two dozen other people climbed across the hills south of Miles city on a recent weekend in Custer County, using sticks to poke around the rocky brush.
“I think it’s just fun being out here on a Saturday morning as a family,” said Hilger, who came with her husband and two daughters. “But it would be really exciting if we could actually find one.”
They were searching for signs of the Greater Short-horned Lizard, a species of horned lizard that looks a lot like a toad and burrows down into the soft earth around ant hills for an ongoing meal.
Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks biologist Amanda Hall says state wildlife managers want to know more about this reptile they suspect is in decline.
“We don't know a lot about their range, we don’t know a lot about their distribution, how many of them there currently are,” said Hall. “So, it’s really important for us, to make the best management decisions and take conservation actions for these species, we need to know more about them.”
That’s why the Horned Lizard Conservation Society and wildlife managers organized public events like this across Canada, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.
They’re teaching citizen scientists what to look for and how to log their sightings of different horned lizard species into a public database. Hall says the more data, the better researchers can understand how development and other stressors are impacting Greater Short-horned Lizards.
“They love to live in rangeland, grassland, sagebrush kind of areas, and these areas that are under a lot of threat in Montana,” she said.
No one spotted any lizards on this particular expedition, but searchers found lots of other wildlife treasures, including a speckled egg, snake skin and plenty of bones. That includes a pile of bones Mandie Hilger’s 5-year-old daughter Peyton collected in her shirt and presented to her mother as future yard decorations.
That includes a pile of bones Mandie Hilger’s 5-year-old daughter Peyton collected in her shirt and presented to her mother as future yard decorations.
They’re fated for the Hilgers’ flower beds, which is exactly where Mandie Hilger says they ended up.
