Under dry Cow patties

Spring is close here in the Sonoran Desert, but this year, there are hardly any flowers or fresh leaves yet. But by now I get desperate for small critters to photograph. So I turn over old, dried-out cow dung. There is very little wood on the ground and rocks are neatly embedded into the loose desert sand. So old cow pies is where everybody is hiding!
Today I found spiders and scorpions, centipedes, termites, some few caterpillars, true bugs, weevils and ground beetles. Once last year I found a really rare Oil beetle.

Today's nice surprise was a vertebrate: A Western Banded Gecko. He was very patient with me exposing him to the sun for a few pictures and a video. Usually they just scuttle away into the darkest corner they can find. This one was big enough to be fully grown, but like many of his kind in southeastern Arizona, he had retained the juvenile banded pattern. Western Arizona relatives sport rows of spots rather than bands.

 

I uploaded the videos to flickr, because I got the impression that the quality is better than if I load it directly to the blog. It's still just one click away, enjoy!