This small lizard was a brave little showoff, flashing his belly colors, doing pushups, waggling his tail, and chasing off all nearby lizards, including much larger banded rock lizards and granite spiny lizards. Stebbins mentions Borrego Palm Canyon as the northernmost tip of the range of this species.

The population in this area used to be considered a separate species, the Small-scaled Lizard (Urosaurus microscutatus).

I was back at the same beautiful desert canyon seven years later on a blisteringly hot day. It was so hot that there were very few reptiles out, just a handful of side-blotched lizards and whiptails. When I reached the highest point I was intending to reach, I sat down on a boulder in the shade to rest for awhile and kill some time before heading back down the canyon. (I wanted to kill some time to avoid disturbing a small herd of desert bighorn sheep that were browsing and drinking in the part of the canyon I had climbed up through earlier.)

While waiting, I caught sight of this little guy on a nearby boulder. I spent fifteen minutes watching it dash from one rock to another, gobbling up a number of tiny insects.

Maybe one of these years I'll see a Urosaurus nigricaudus somewhere other than Borrego Palm Canyon. But maybe not.