Spot, Goober, and Other Iguanas Who Saved My Life
Queens, New York, 1970
Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside him, as he had never been hurt in his life before…”What is it? What is it” he said. “I do not wish to leave the jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?” — Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
The baby green iguana sat in my palm. His wide-open eye, afraid and curious all at once, peered into mine. His black oil pupil had a thin ring of gold around it. His wispy, banded tail reached my elbow. The way he tilted his head to look around the room, the way he bent down to touch my skin with his pink tongue, the way his sides moved in and out with each breath. His every movement had a reptilian timing that was somehow familiar and comforting—something I craved more than anything as an eight-year-old in an alien place.
He would be the first of many iguanas who brought me solace when I felt lost and alone.
It was April 1970, eight months after my mother had moved us from my grandparents’ idyllic rural Indiana home to the concrete jungle of New York City. To say it was a culture shock would be an understatement.
From nursery school through first grade, my mother and I had lived in the college town of Bloomington, in a house on tree-lined Clark Street with our cat, Felix—my mother loved the name Felix and did not care that it was usually given to boys. Of the images I have from that time, one is of Jordan Creek, winding through a grassy field on the campus, with a few trees along the sides. I had an easy climb down the bank to get to the water to look for crawdads. Another image is of a white beer can stuck in the rocks. I’m certain there was more litter in the creek because I felt an urgency to gather the crawdads and put them in a bucket for the regular rides to my grandparents’ house half an hour away in Mooresville and let them go in the cleaner ponds there where I knew they would be safe and happy.
I’d stayed with my grandparents during vacations and on weekends while my mother was finishing her undergraduate degree at the university. In Mooresville, I had a best friend named Lori Hickerson who lived across Keller Hill Road, which was paved just enough to keep back the weeds and briar bushes. We went looking for box turtles in the woods. We swam in the pool at my grandparents’ house and baked cookies at hers. In Mooresville, I didn’t need shoes. I went barefoot in the mud by the ponds, finding green frogs and cricket frogs and, now and then, I caught and held my favorite bullfrog.
I was used to playing in the woods, and now I was faced with nothing but urban sprawl. The relocation was a jarring adjustment for me—but also what my mother felt she needed to do to follow her passion. After all, she had been only fifteen years old when she had me. But even before I was born, she’d known that she wanted to be a painter. To make that dream a reality, she would need to live in a city, like New York, where she could meet other artists, and visit galleries and museums to be immersed in the art world. Not only that, but to find a job in her field, she would need to earn a master’s degree. Queens College had a good fine arts program and that’s what brought us to Queens.
That first winter had been difficult. I’m sure my mother looked at me—an unhappy misfit struggling to adapt in the harsh urban environment—and tried to figure out how to help. I gave her clues, ceaselessly hinting at a pet lizard. And when spring came, she brought home that baby iguana, who stole my heart the moment I saw him. It almost made up for everything I had left behind.
Since arriving in New York, I’d felt anxious and at times, lost. Yet, when the baby iguana looked at me, for the first time in ages, I felt grounded, safe. Though I didn’t realize it then, he connected me to the Earth’s web of life even though I was no longer in a place of green plants and many animals, but in one manufactured of concrete for one species only.
Little did I know that this iguana would set me on a lifelong path alongside these magnificent beings.
Along with my new lizard companion, my mother had bought a care guide called Know Your Pet Iguana. I very much wanted to know my iguana, and I read the care guide cover to cover. It said that he came from South America. Holding him in my hands, warming his body against my cheek, I wanted to show him that I knew how he felt being so far from home.
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Here’s an excerpt from a great piece Annemarie Schuetz wrote for the River Reporter:
Lizard people
Sometimes our people are human. Sometimes they aren’t. Does it matter?
By ANNEMARIE SCHUETZ
https://riverreporter.com/stories/lizard-people,136126?
CALLICOON, NY — Wendy Townsend’s morning starts with a little writing before the iguanas wake up.
“Then I’ll look across the room and see Emo,” Townsend said. “He’ll be really focused on me. On what will happen, on my emotional intentions.”
It’s a survival mechanism, she said. So she pets him, makes contact. Reminds him that she is his human, maybe.
“If I don’t tend to him, he’ll get frustrated and bite,” Townsend said.
Not all iguanas like physical contact, but Emo does. Each of her iguanas is different. They are their own people, and they are her people, a deep connection that goes back to Townsend’s childhood.
Hot Weather Lizard
“I arrived on the planet in love with iguanas,” she said.
Not that iguanas were thick on the ground in the Midwest, where she is from. But there was a bullfrog; then there was a lizard. And from such discoveries a life, a pathway, can emerge…
The Boston Globe has published 2 of my personal essays in their Ideas column.
For now, the book about the Jamaican Iguana is on hold.
A book about the Jamaican iguana.
These two short videos about the Jamaican iguana are awesome!
My book for young readers is called Big Lizards on the Brink: The Fight to Save the Jamaican Iguana
Jamaican iguanas were once so common on the southern plains of Jamaica that the region was called the Liguanea Plain, from the Arawak word for iguana. In the 1940s the last Jamaican iguana was seen on Great Goat Island, and the species was declared extinct. Fifty years later a pig hunter named Edwin Duffus and his dogs caught a big lizard in the Hellshire Hills that turned out to be a Jamaican iguana.
The book will shine a light on the Jamaican iguana’s remarkable comeback, and the people who are working to save and protect him.
When I say “iguana,” do you picture a big, green lizard with a tall spiky crest and a long, banded tail, like this guy?
He’s a green iguana, and he lives in the rain forest. The scientific name for the green iguana’s genus is Iguana.
But have you ever heard of a rock iguana?
Rock iguanas are big, plant-eating lizards that have adapted to living in the rocky habitats of some islands in the West Indies. The scientific name for the genus which contains all the rock iguana species is Cyclura. The Jamaican iguana’s scientific name is Cyclura collei.
Jamaican iguanas are part of the rock iguanas of the West Indies. As a group, these rock iguanas are the most endangered lizards in the world. Why does that matter? Rock iguanas are a keystone species in a strange and beautiful biodiverse habitat called a dry limestone forest that’s also endangered. Plus, rock iguanas are super-cool. Scientists and zookeepers and field researchers love working with rock iguanas because they are big lizards with big personalities who will hang out with you when they get to know you.
Hoping to see a Jamaican iguana I went to Jamaica in June of 2019. Iguana scientist Dr. Stesha Pasachnik met me at the airport and early the next morning we got on a boat for the two-hour ride to the beach at the foot of the Hellshire Hills.
After carrying our supplies ashore, we pitched our tents under the low canopy of sea grape trees, covered ourselves with sunscreen and bug spray, filled our water bottles and headed out. We walked up the beach past a salt marsh where crocodiles sometimes hung out. The trail was just past the marsh, and we followed it into the forest.
Small lizards scurried in the leaf litter and hummingbirds whizzed past us. Moths with dark patterned wings as big as my hand rested on the leaves of low branches. The trail went over big patches of pocked limestone rock called karst that was not easy to walk on. One slip and you could really hurt yourself on the sharp edges of the karst. Some of the bushes and trees were spiny and tall cacti grew along the trail, so you had to be careful what to reach for when helping yourself climb up a steep part. I was in rock iguana habitat for sure, and excited to think that one of the big lizards could run across our path at any time.
After an hour of hiking uphill, Stesha put a finger to her lips. We silently walked slowly toward a blind that looked like a small shack made of branches and scraps of wood and covered with a tarp. Bobby, an intern with the iguana project, sat in the blind with a notebook on his lap, watching through a panel of mesh. Stesha went to check in with the field rangers and I sat down on a rock nearby. I looked through the panel of mesh and caught my breath.
So much was happening I didn’t know where to look first. Five lizards at least three feet long rapidly dug in the brick-red earth making burrows, pulling it out with their front feet and kicking it up in sprays with their back ones. All the lizards wore a fine coating of the iron-rich red soil. A red plume shot out of a hole as the tail and rear legs of one lizard wriggled out backward part way, then went down to dig some more. Another came out of her burrow headfirst and then she started pushing and kicking soil across its entry. I noticed her sunken flanks; she’d laid her eggs in the burrow.
At the edge of the bushes a big female tried to drive off a newcomer. A small female, slate gray and olive, dappled in aquamarine and turquoise blue, the new iguana did not yet wear her coating of red. Bobby said the little iguana would have to fight extra-hard for space to dig. Closer to the center of the site two females went nose-to-nose, chins and bellies on the ground; bobbing heads in their iguana language to say, this is my nest hole, go dig your own!
At one point ten female iguanas were in motion on the nest site. I watched them strut and face off, rising high up on their muscular legs. Their red-dusted lizard bodies and long tails curved as they turned in half circles to check on their work of digging nests. It was a dance of dragons –and paradise for a lizard lover like me…
That night, I thought about what I’d witnessed at the nest site. It was a ritual that very few people got to see. It had been going on for centuries, but still, I had the sense that the iguanas’ drive to create a new generation was extra-intense, as though they knew how close they’d come to going extinct.
Saving the Jamaican iguana depends on the head-start program at the Hope Zoo and the amazing staff of the iguana reserve, led by Jodi-Ann Blissett. I was thrilled to meet her when I visited Jamaica. She is a born reptile lover, like me.
I got my first pet green iguana when I was eight years old and I have loved iguanas and other reptiles ever since. There was only one year in my life when I didn’t have any iguanas and it was a terrible year. Now I live with three rhinoceros iguanas and two Cuban iguanas named Sebastian, Ava, Emo, and Luna and Che. Each lizard has his or her own personality, and they keep me busy with their ways and the care I give them. They are all rock iguanas, and cousins of the Jamaican iguanas. When I went to Jamaica to research this book, the Jamaican iguanas often reminded me of my iguanas, and so I wrote about my observations and experiences in My Iguana Notebook. I’ll share some of those observations with you throughout this book.
I hope this book will inspire you to not only appreciate iguanas, but to start a notebook of your own where you can write or draw your experiences with family pets, or animals outdoors. All you need is a notebook or sketch pad, a pencil or pen, and your eyes, ears, and heart.
My Iguana Notebook
On a warm spring day in 1993 around the time that a pig hunter named Edwin Duffus would find a Jamaican iguana, I was in Big Pine Key, Florida, stepping inside a cage where a rhinoceros iguana named Mao and his mate, Gretta lived. Rhinoceros iguanas and Jamaican iguanas are cousins. The cage was 18 feet by 12 feet, furnished with big limestone rocks, a long, thick tree branch and several cacti.
Mao and Gretta were finishing up their lunch of shredded greens, veggies, and fruit. I sat down on a rock and Mao followed me. He placed one of his feet on my left foot. I remember looking down at his black foot –his hand, really—and how it nearly covered the toe of my white sneaker. Mao began to stand on his back legs to climb into my lap, and I reached down to help him up. For a moment I leaned back slightly from his head that was as big as both my fists put together and just inches from my face. I looked at the long lines of his strong jaw, aware of the many sharp teeth inside his mouth. Lizards and dinosaurs diverged millions of years ago, but I still felt like I had a dinosaur in my lap.
Mao’s belly was warm from the sun and he was heavier than my cat. I stroked his back and around his chest and head. The small scales of his skin felt like raw silk, but alive. He tilted his head and he peered into my eyes with his gray ones. My throat tightened and my eyes filled from the emotion of connecting with another being. We looked at each other like that for a few moments. I didn’t want to ever leave Mao and I promised myself that one day, I would live with rhinoceros iguanas.
Lizard Lady 