This little guy is a baby horned lizard. I see adult ones on my property a lot and these little babies are either really hard to spot or are just not around all that much.

Surprisingly these lizards are very friendly creatures, of course it takes a little bit to get one into your hands, but the ones around my place don't run away like other types of lizards do.

In California and Texas these little guys are protected, however, they're not on the federal endangered species list.

The main diet of the horned lizard is small insects, primarily the harvester ant. I have a lot of harvester ants on my property so that's probably why there are a lot of these horned lizards around - they have food there.

Harvester ants can be really unsightly and somewhat intimidating with their wide trails to where they're doing their harvesting. Literally thousands of ants traveling back and forth harvesting food for storage in their nest.

When I first bought my property I had to make some hard decisions about how I wanted to exist with it. With unsightly pests like harvester ants it was difficult to make some of these decisions.

After looking at the effects of me exterminating the harvester ant from my property, I decided that it would not be worth it. If I had exterminated the harvester ants the little horned lizard's parents might have moved on to a location where there's more food and I wouldn't be able to enjoy their presence as I continue to do today.

We have to remember that all the things we do effect everything around us. Changing or eliminating a species from an area could effect many other creatures that live there also. Let's take responsibility and care for those that were there first too.