Wednesday, May 29, 1996

Horned Toad vanishing in much of state

By JOHN MacCORMACK
San Antonio Express-News

BENAVIDES - Spaced a few yards apart, eyes scanning the ground, the searchers shuffle-stepped across a bumpy South Texas field, probing with all the intensity of rookie federal agents assigned to the Unabomber case.

But it was not forensic evidence they sought. Rather, it was that endearing reptilian gargoyle known to scientists as the "Texas Horned Lizard," and to the rest of the world as the horny toad.
"This is one of their scats," said Scott Fair, a Texas A&M-Kingsville graduate, plucking a coffee-colored lizard dropping from the dry ground.

"You can see all the bumps in it. Those are ant heads and ant bodies. But you can usually find scat faster than you can find the lizards," cautioned Fair, whose thesis involved tracking horn toads by radio in the South Texas brush.

On this recent field trip of the Texas Chapter of the Horned Lizard Conservation Society, the old toad hunter's axiom largely held true.

During two morning sweeps at the Bomer Wildlife Management Area, only five horny toads were flushed from hiding among the gopher mounds, prickly pear and buffelgrass.

The 130-acre wildlife site is 12 miles south of Benavides and has been used by Texas A&M-Kingsville graduate students such as Fair for quail and toad studies.

"I was just walking. I saw this thing move a little bit and I tried to grab it. It went off, and I grabbed it again, and it sprayed blood out," said an awed Curtis Hill, 8, whose parents traveled from La Vernia on the chance their children would see the legendary beast.

The horned lizard was designated the Texas state reptile in 1992, by unhappy coincidence, the same year a study was published documenting its precipitous decline in many areas.

As quintessentially Texan as the armadillo, as Lone Star as the longhorn, and once as common as grasshoppers, the Texas horned toad is now only a memory in many places.

Pesticides, loss of habitat, the displacement of red ants by fire ants and other causes are suspected, but so far no one has conclusively determined what is behind their decline.

"It's a cold reality. The Texas Horned Lizard doesn't exist in East Texas anymore, except for a few informal reintroductions, and the species will continue to decline in Central and Northern Texas as cities continue to grow," said Wendy Hodges, a University of Texas at Austin graduate student who co-authored the 1992 study.

"In South Texas and West Texas, the populations appear stable unless there are landscape-scale changes," she said.

Once made into curios, traded at Boy Scout Jamborees and collected for the pet trade, the lizard now is listed as a threatened species by federal authorities. It is illegal to collect, possess or remove Texas Horned Lizards from their habitat.

It was in response to the alarming trends that the Texas Horned Lizard Conservation Society was founded in Austin six years ago. Its mission is to publicize the horny toad's plight, to preserve existing habitats and to research the feasibility of reintroduction into its former range.

The society has 300 dues-paying members from across the state and puts out a periodic newsletter addressed to "phrynosomatics," a word derived from the horned toad's latin name, phrynosoma.
The society went national three years ago when a second chapter opened in Southern California where the Coastal Horned Lizard, a related species, is likewise imperiled.

Most who join are inspired less by science than by nostalgia.

"When I think of them as playthings, I call them horny toads. When I think of them as a zoological phenomenon, I call them horned lizards," said Clare Freeman, 59, the society's treasurer.

"We get letters all the time from people who say I played with these when I was a kid and they're gone now. You might say our members are kids, but kids in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s," she said.

"Women will write and say, 'When we were girls, we made dresses for horny toads.' Other people will write and talk about making little wagons out of matchboxes and hauling them around," she said.

And like the letter writers, Freeman, who grew up in Snyder, recalls with fondness a Texas childhood enriched by the fierce-looking but harmless creatures.

"And when I was a kid, they were everywhere. Everyone knows about hypnotizing them. You put them on their backs and stroked their bellies. We thought you had to rub them in a counterclockwise circle," she said.

"They'd get really still and sometimes they'd stay that way for a few minutes. We'd put little sticks in their paws. Some people did dreadful things to them, boys mostly, but you don't want to put that in your paper," she said.

After the toad hunt, the society held its quarterly meeting under the mesquites, while several small boys kept close watch over the five toads being held in a 10-gallon tank before release.

Beyond the usual business of account balances and correspondence, a surprising proposal was put forth by a visitor, Don Ickles, a field representative of the Texas Education Agency from San Angelo.

"We have a new state park in San Angelo, and its whole focus is to be an education and research center. The park is prepared to dedicate 500 acres for a horned lizard center, and we would welcome your consideration of the area," he told them.

Ickles' offer came with a caveat, however: "The state will not get involved with fund-raising."
Society Vice President Carolyn Todd said the proposal was both unexpected and intriguing.

"I believe it's very serious. We'll be doing a site survey in San Angelo on June 22. I think it's a tremendous opportunity for us to educate the public and have a protected habitat for horned lizards," she said.

Contacted later by phone, San Angelo State Park Superintendent John Culbertson said he is eager to explore the possibilities of a collaboration.

"We've got quite a few horned toads out here. I saw one yesterday in fact. We've got plenty of red ant beds and undisturbed areas. We could create a study area," he said.

"If we could get a plan in writing as exactly what they need, we could run it through master planning and I feel we could get it approved," he said.

After the meeting was over, some members paused to reflect before starting on the long drive home.

Among them was Larry Wisdom, 59, who came 400 miles from Blooming Grove to attend his first meeting as a member of the Horned Lizard Conservation Society.

"My grandfather was a Methodist minister in the Central Texas Conference, and as a boy I'd spend the summers with him in little towns like Venus, Grayford and Moody," he said.

"The first thing I would do would be to build a little stone corral about three feet in diameter and eight inches high, and start collecting them. You literally could find hundreds of them," he said.

"They'd be all gone the next morning, and I'd start out all over again. That was the fun of it. After you had caught one, two or three times, you'd recognize it. Sometimes their horns would be different, just like longhorn cattle," he said.

Asked what essential quality made horned toads so attractive to him as a child, Wisdom first mentioned the odd shape, but then seized upon another characteristic.

"Texas has an abundance of lizards, but the only one I could catch almost everytime was the horned toad. He's just not that fast," he said.

Wisdom, a retired Frito-Lay Co. researcher who helped bring the world Doritos, Munchos and Funyuns, is now building life-size horned toad replicas for his grandchildren, some of whom he fears may never see the real thing.

"I had literally thousands of encounters with horned toads. My children had dozens," he said. "And last year I took my four eldest grandchildren to a dude ranch in Bandera, and they saw the first one they'd ever seen in their lives."
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The Horned Lizard Conservation Society can be contacted at Post Office Box 122, Austin 78767.