I had a presentation to make in Austin on a Monday, and so I thought I might fly out Sunday morning and see if I could get in some hiking and herping somewhere nearby.  I caught the 6AM flight out of Champaign, and by noon I was heading west of town towards Pedernales State Park.  It was a sunny day, with a few clouds, and the temperature was climbing through the eighties as I drove through the Texas hill country.

Arriving at the park I decided to hike along the Wolf Mountain trail, in an area of the park without much human traffic.  It passed through the primitive camping area, which proved ideal, as I met only a few people during that day.  If I wanted to hang around humans I would have stayed in Austin!

I parked my car at the trailhead in the shade of a large Emory Oak, which gave me my first herp in the form of a very large Texas Spiny Lizard, who did his best to keep the tree between me and him.  I managed to get a couple shots of him before he'd had enough and scurried up into the upper branches.  It wouldn't be a day in Texas without an olivacea somewhere in the picture.

Not far down the trail I saw something scuttle across and into the vegetation.  It was a small Texas Earless Lizard, doing his best to keep a certain amount of distance from me.  This species is prone to curling their tail up and pointing it towards the head, which makes the set of black bars on the ventral side of the tail visible.  This was a young male, as evidenced by the pair of sickle-shaped marks on each side of the body about midway between the front and back legs.  During the course of the day I tried to get close to a number of these lizards, but they were very skittish.  I finally managed to find a female who tolerated my presence long enough for a close-up shot or two.

Female Texas Earless Lizard

Further on, a striped blur on the trailside got my attention.  It was a Texas Spotted Whiptail, and he stopped on the far side of a cedar log, where perhaps he felt secure enough to rest for a bit.  I managed to get a shot or two with my telephoto lens.  It looked like a young adult male to me, and I watched him for a few minutes, until he dashed away in pursuit of his next meal.  Whiptails do not let the grass grow under their feet.

I ran into a young couple returning from the primitive campground up the trail.  They showed me a little shortcut off the trail to the banks of Bee Creek, a spring-fed watercourse that emptied into the Pedernales River.  Almost immediately I found myself amidst a large host of hopping amphibians, large and small...