Where can I put seed balls for Horned Lizard habitat?
The short answer is everywhere horned lizards used to be and everywhere they still are! 'Where's that', you ask? Have a gander at this here range map for Texas Horned Lizards. Everywhere the "historic range" touches could and should be planted with native grassland mixes in seed balls.
At Rehorning Texas, we've created several horned lizard habitat & food web native plant seed mixes, available as seed balls, for the major ecoregions and habitats where Texas Horned Lizard restoration is needed most.
These include a mix for the Trans-Pecos grasslands, another for the Pandhandle's Plains, one for Central Texas where the horned lizard's prairie habitat has been receding westward, and others. We can also make custom mix seed balls on request for any region Texas Horned Lizards or their habitat are being restored.
How many seed mixes should I use to restore Horned Lizard habitat?
In most cases, especially in urban horned lizard habitat restoration, two or three mixes will be necessary: one with taller grasses and forbs where horned lizards can find shade and cover from predators, another with shorter species of grasses and wildlfowers planted adjacent to the taller grasses so that horned lizards can bask, forage for prey, and camouflage against the bare soil in between the root crowns of bunchgrasses. Horned lizards should be able to shuffle between these patches of tall and short plants. A third mix for shade-adapted species will likely be needed in shady areas that receive less than 6 hours of sunlight.
Recent research at TCU has proven that such horned lizard habitat "mosaics" of taller grasses, forbs, and shrubs adjacent to short, trodden plants exist in some small-town alleyways. The fence lines and edges of some alleyways often have taller weeds while the middle of the alley is often trodden or mown short. This mimics the natural habitat needs of horned lizards, and so horned lizard numbers are frequently higher in some small-town alleyways in parts of their range. We encourage folks to plant horned lizard habitat seedballs in alleyways, turnrows, churchyards, schoolyards, front yards, and back yards.
What kinds of plant species are important to include for Texas Horned Lizards?
Texas Horned Lizards are a prairie species. And the healthier a prairie is, the more prairie species like horned lizards it can sustain. 'What makes a prairie healthy', you ask? Generally, a very high number of native species, beginning with a high number of native plants. That's the best earmark of a healthy prairie—lots of biodiversity! There can be hundreds of native plant species in a healthy prairie. Pepper in some keystone species and keystone processes in generous proportions and you've got the makings of a special place.
And prairies, by the way, are native grasslands. Not surprisingly, prairies are therefore dominated by native grasses. There are nearly 500 species of native grasses in Texas and practically none of them are like the turf lawngrasses so many of us are used to (e.g., Bermudagrass from Africa or St. Augustine grass from the West Indies). Turf grasses don't support much wildlife, including horned lizards. Rather, native Texas grasses tend to be bunchgrasses that form roundish clumps, and these clumps can range in size from a softball to a beachball. Such bunchgrasses are required for healthy horned lizard habitat, because their leafy skirts offer them cover and shade, absence of turf growth means bare soil in between the root crowns for camouflaging and scurrying hither and thither, and they provide a lot of seeds that are favored by one of Texas Horned Lizards' favorite prey species—Seed Harvester Ants.
Native Texas wildflowers are also very important for the structural habitat & food web needs of Texas Horned Lizards. During the heat of summer, surface temperatures on unshaded bare ground reach temperatures that are lethal to Texas Horned Lizards for more than five hours of the day. Many native wildflowers that grow in bouquet-like clumps provide crucial shade and cover from predators.
And while Seed Harvester Ants are mostly eaten by adult horned lizards, baby Texas Horned Lizards will eat ants too, but they tend to eat smaller varieties of native ants—because Harvester Ants are often too big for hatchling horned lizards to eat.
For instance, check out this video of a hatchling Texas Horned Lizard eating Big-Headed Ants (Pheidole) in South Texas...
You can support the native ants and other small insects that horned lizards eat by planting a high diversity of native Texas wildflowers in addition to some native Texas bunchgrasses. We can help you develop a diverse mix of plants tailored to your region, and we then find plant species that emphasize the needs of native ants and Texas Horned Lizards.
There's a variety of native plant species that support native ants more than others.
Some native Texas plants, like this Partridge Pea (shown in the adjacent video), have extrafloral nectaries that are visited almost constantly by native ants...
Other species of native plants attract native ants because these plants support aphids. And aphids are often attended by ants who guard them for their honeydew. Shown in this adjacent video is a Butterfly Milkweed covered with aphids and small ants attending the aphids...
And yet some other native plants have fatty snacks for the ants on the seedcoat. The ants help the plants (and vice versa) because they disperse the seeds by carrying them to their colonies where they devour the oily appendage (called an elaiosome) and then discard the actual seed where it later grows, often in a place protected by (and fertilized by the activities of) the ants.
There are other considerations too. For instance, the most important food for some populations of Texas Horned Lizards in South Texas are Grass Harvester Termites (shown adjacent in the video taken in Junction, Texas). They provide more calories for horned lizards than do ants! This particular colony of Grass Harvester Termites shown were harvesting decomposed pieces of a native grass called Eastern Gamagrass.
