OF THE UNITED STATES 



125 



color, and covered with hard, rounded, tuberculated scales. They 

 are very fond of birds' eggs, either raw or boiled, but prefer tlieiu 

 raw. As they are by no means arboreal in habit, they can only 

 secure such eggs of birds as build their nests upon the ground, or 

 else very near it. 



Besides the helodernis, I found while in New Mexico quite a 

 number of other lizards, but they were all of the smaller species, 

 perfectly harmless, and with more or less interesting habits. The 

 genus iSeelopoi'US was represented, and a little further on I shall 

 say something about our eastern forms of these. Another pretty 

 little fellow was found, though not very abundantly, which the 

 Mexicans, or New Mexicans, called the Whipped-tailed Lizard, 

 and which is more generally known as the Collared Lizard (Crola- 

 phytus collaris). They are bright pea-green little fellows, orna- 

 mented with a black collar, and are very nimble in action. From 

 a beautiful living specimen of one of these J secured a tine photo- 

 graph, and this is reproduced in Fig. 32. 'rotaphytus is a 

 wood lizard, and is found in the heavy pine forests of New Mex- 

 ico, but it also occurs in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Arkan- 

 sas, California, Indiana, and elsewhere. 



The lizard called the "SSix-lined Lizard" has a somewhat simi- 

 lar distribution, and I found specimens of these also in New Mex- 

 ico. They are beautiful forms, gentle, shapely, graceful, and 

 handsomely marked with narrow, jet-black, longitudinal lines 

 upon a light-green body. 



It was my practice to capture these lizards by shooting them 

 with a cane-gun, loaded with No. 13 shot; it was the very rarest 

 occurrence that they could be secured otherwise. 



In making photographs of various species of our lizards, I 

 found them to be a much easier class of subjects than many an- 

 other kind of vertebrate, as, for example, any of the snakes, frogs, 

 or toads, and very much easier than any of the land tortoises or 

 the turtles; the latter constituting a very difficult class of sub- 

 jects. 



Last summer several successes were obtained in the case of the 

 common little alligator lizard so plentiful in nearly all parts of 

 the country. This is the Sceloporus u. undulatus of most herpe- 

 tologists, but as the pretty, nimble little fellows have never re- 

 minded me in the least bit of an alligator, I have generally desig- 

 nated them as "wood lizards," from the fact that they are very 

 fond of running up trees, and are rarely found out in the open 



