Photo by Joe Klein

On the fifth morning, I found a small, rather terrified lizard in my trap.

My awareness of the lizards dates from the construction of our house two years ago, when the boards that were to form this room and this pair of windows lay in stacks under which the lizards, accustomed to weeds and abandoned firewood, hid themselves and were crushed. If they managed to escape the pinch of plywood, our Doberman harassed them, circling their hiding places as though they were food, not the sport he made of them when on rare occasions he darted down and snatched one in his teeth.

When the house was finished, the lizards began to flit across its porches and gravel walks, to hide in the old wooden boxes we use for firewood, and to die there, once again, when the pressure of wood caught them by surprise. On winter mornings they’re too cold to move when I find them curled under buckets or peeling orange wood. When the sun is higher, they speed around the lavender and rock roses, fleeing from me as every creature on the property flees. My step launches an exodus of crows, rabbits, mice, ground squirrels, lizards, finches, and dark-eyed juncos who never come to sit on my finger.

But when I sit very still at the desk between two windows, one facing north and the other east, no creature is aware of me. At first this quiet staring was an idle, intermittent activity, but now I must know whether the lizard doing pushups on the mowing curb is a Southern Sagebrush or a Great Basin Fence. And I must know if he is (as I suspect) doing pushups to show off. And when I see a California Whiptail under the rock rose. I’m afraid that he’s hunting the little Uta stansburiana I caught in my aluminum tomato can the other day. The California Whiptail lizard, with his tail like a dried lock of red hair, eats other lizards, so I regard him as the enemy; but when I see him hunting I realize that I’d truly like to know how he kills a stansburiana and how he eats one. A window is like a sad novel in that regard. I hate what is about to happen, but I feel I will benefit, somehow, from knowing how it came to pass.

Which is why I washed a tomato can and sank it in the dirt between two roses. I’d been hoping my guidebooks would tell me how to identify lizards from a distance of six feet so that all I would ever have to do is look on. But after a whole lot of talk about “noosing” (in which one slips a noose of no. 50 thread around the lizard’s neck) and homemade muslin pillowcases, preferably sewn with French seams, that one ties to one’s belt in the manner of Puss in Boots (“Some snakes have the remarkable ability to work their way out of sacks,” so one is urged not to carry venomous specimens), the books proceed to give descriptions like this: “Scelo-porus occidentalis. A black, gray, or brown lizard with blotched pattern. Sides of belly blue. 35-51 scales between interparietal and rear of thighs.”

All the lizards at my window are black, gray, or brown, and blotchy. They only show their bellies to each other in rivalry or courtship (by means of those beefy pushups), so the only time I’ve ever had a long look underneath was the time that one climbed up the screen of our French door. Although I was moved by his sapphire and pearl tummy, I didn’t think to count his interparietal scales.

It seemed I must, then, either noose or can a specimen, turning a steel lid from my kitchen into a primitive trap door. There was something faintly evil about all this (which is why I decided not to noose anybody), but the trap had a pleasing, homemade aura, as though I had turned into a nerdy seventh-grade boy.

The guide urged me to check my trap daily, and I did. I checked it, in fact, all the time. The lid had a tendency to fall in of its own accord, so if I didn’t see the flash of sun on metal, I raced out to see what I’d caught. By the third day, I felt that reptiles of the order Squamata, which has been on the earth for 180 million years, were perhaps too clever for the old tomato can trick.

But on the fifth morning, I found a small, rather terrified lizard in my trap. It was a triumph I can only compare to being asked to the prom. In my chenille bathrobe, I hovered over him like a giant pink roadrunner. I said things to him like, “Now what?” I gingerly poured him and his bit of dirt into a mop-bucket terrarium thoughtfully furnished with a rock, which he promptly used to escape my roadrunner eyes.

At this point, the Peterson Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians had some suggestions. First of all, I should remember when making my identifications that “a dark lizard may become pale while being handled.” Furthermore, if I wanted to determine the sex of my captive, I could evert the hemipenes of the breeding male by gently squeezing with my thumb and forefinger, applying pressure toward the vent opening at or just behind the swollen tail base. If this failed, I could hold the lizard by the head and gently probe the rear edge and sides of the vent with a toothpick, thrusting the probe backward.

Both of us, I felt, would turn pale if I tried this. So I sat down with the colored plates of my guidebook and wished I could assure him (or her) that no toothpicks would be used.

Though I had put my captive in exactly the sort of place described as “temporary quarters” in the field guide, I was quite sure that I had only a few hours before the lizard died of hunger in my care. The guide, you see, said that I could establish a colony of meal worms to feed long-term captives, but that lizards who eat nothing but bran-fed meal worms will eventually languish. I would thus need to establish a termite colony (the termites would eat paper towels), but then ants might attack the termites and the meal worms, so I would need to elevate their colonies above a moat of water that the ants couldn’t swim across.

It was simpler to stay on the laundry porch for a few hours. I dropped a roly-poly in the bucket as though I were an animal trainer at Sea World, and then I made a twiggy ramp that would, I hoped, encourage the captive to explore the screen ceiling and show me his delicate, blue-tinged undersides.

I must say that my hopes for this encounter were intensified by reading J. Henri Fabre, a passionate turn-of-the-century entomologist who spoke of the insects in his yard (“my dear beasts of former days”) as the saucy Cricket-hunter; the Spider-huntress; the hot-tempered, swashbuckling Wasp; the loathsome, free-booting Ant; and the young Cricket nomad who cares not where he lays his head. “O my pretty insects,” Fabre addresses them, saying, “Here, surely...is a company both numerous and select, whose conversation will not fail to charm my solitude, if I succeed in drawing it out.”

But as I brought my face down to the lizard, I couldn’t help thinking about the three species of horned lizards who can increase the blood pressure in the sinuses of their eye sockets until they burst, splattering predators while they are still four feet away. The blood apparently has a bad, discouraging taste. Though none of these blood-hurling relatives live in my garden, I sensed that my solitude would be less charmed if the lizard so much as jumped at me.

But he did no jumping, perhaps because there aren’t as many bugs on my nose as live in the hydrangeas. Nor did he stalk the wandering roly-poly, who clearly had no idea what was going on. The lizard displayed no interest in the tiny fly who’d been poured with the dirt into his new habitat and whose deceased relative was spinning in a bit of spider fluff that hung down from the jagged edge of the stone. He further declined to ascend my wooden ramp and show me the belly marks that would enable me to do what Robert Stebbins of the Peterson Field Guide urged me to do — write down the Latin and common name of my species in . Higgins Eternal Ink. He preferred to dash under the stone whenever I glanced away and to freeze whenever I, monster that I am, picked up the stone.

It was sheer proximity that charmed me. His claws were as thin as embroidery floss unraveled, and he had a wisp of grass on his head, which gave him an agreeably foolish air. If he hadn’t been so terrified, I might have touched his smooth-skinned head, which was thinner than my index finger, or his oval body, barely two inches long. His tail was longer than the rest of him, and it narrowed to a fine, dusty cord. He stood so still he might have been dead, and then he blinked his eggshell eyes. The yellow and black chevrons on his auburn skin faded at each extremity, so he seemed to begin and end as dust. But most delicate of all was the inky-blue mark just behind each of his front legs, as dark as an indigo bruise. This mark gave the male Uta stans-buriana his common and rather ugly name, the Side-blotched Lizard, and made me feel I could write, in mortal ink, his name and habits in my notebook — his taste for scorpions, mites, ticks, and sowbugs; his speckled orange throat like a bib of zest; his survival when I lifted the screen ceiling, added more twiggy ramps, and let him go.