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"Looky there, now would you? It's a horny toad! Ah ain't seen one nem li'l critters since a month o' Sundeys," my husband exclaimed, when he spotted a horned frog scampering along the ground beside him on a recent outing. Suddenly the spikey lizard flattened and didn't move a muscle.
"And you have to really look close or you'd miss this one," I said. "Look how well he blends into the rocky environment."
Mel bent down to get a closer look, and the horny toad puffed up and made a hissing sound.
"You know, they can eben squirt blood from their eyeballs when they git rahled up," Mel commented.
"Do you expect me to believe that?"
"Ah'm serious. They can squirt it from as far as five feet!"
"Well step back, then, because you've got on a white teeshirt, and I wouldn't want anyone to think I had bludgeoned you."
"Somebody wrote a book called The Texas Toad Prince, which is a Texas version of the Grimm's fairytale, The Frog Prince, only funny," he said.
I was impressed with Mel's knowledge of this lowly toad, which he said is not really a toad at all but a Phrynosoma, or a horned lizard.
"Folks call 'em horned frogs," he explained, "but they ain't a true frog. Did you know the horny toad is the Texas State Reptile?"
"I'll be sure to commit that to long-term memory, in case Alex Trebek asks me that next time I'm on 'Jeopardy,'" I replied.
"Here's some more trivia on these innerstin' li'l guys...They eat lotsa ants, grasshoppers, crickets, an' pill bugs. They live in burrows, whur they hibernate from late September to May. They mate after they come outta thur deep sleep. Bet this un's lookin' fer a female raht now. She'll lay a clutch of about 30 eggs and the babies hatch in five to nine weeks. Despite that, the horny toad is a state-listed threatened species (federal category C2)."
"Guess that's because they like to warm up on asphalt, and they get smashed," I suggested.
While a lot are killed on roadways, Mel attributed their decline to the tourist traps on Texas highways in the 1950s and early sixties, where horny toads were sold as souvenirs.
"They wuz payin' a buncho' enterprisin' school kids a nickel apiece for 'em, and it didn't take long to nurly wipe 'em out," he said. "The lizards died when removed from thur natural home, so the state began protecting the Texas Horned Lizard in 1967."
"They are awfully cute," I said. "I can see why they made a good souvenir."
"When we wuz kids, we liked to turn 'em over on thur backs and stroke thur bellies a'til they dozed off. Thank Ah'll see if that still works," Mel announced.
My husband lunged at the toad, which darted up the trail, into the brush. Shortly, Mel emerged with a blood-spattered teeshirt.
"Is that blood from the horny toad's eyeballs?" I asked.
"Nope," said Mel. "That's blood from MAH eyeballs. Ah wuz concentratin' so hard on catchin' 'at quick li'l booger, Ah forgot to duck!"
