Animals

The smaller town corvid. Most black birds on the basin dumps and poles are still ravens.

A hare, not a rabbit. Big ears, a black tail tip, and a habit of crossing roads at dusk.

The bright blue jay of oaks, yards, and the west side of the basin. Not the same bird as the grayer Woodhouse’s jay of pinyon flats.

The big vegetarian lizard of the rock piles. If it wedges into a crack and inflates, that crack is its whole plan.

The big black bird on the power pole. Intelligent, increasing around people, and a real predator of young tortoises.

The animal this desk is named for. Common from town edges to open desert, and mostly a problem when people feed it.

Desert bighorn use the rocky corridors between the park and the San Bernardino Mountains.

The yard rabbit with shorter ears and a white puff tail; the jackrabbit is the long-eared one.

A small nocturnal fox of the creosote flats. Easy to confuse with a coyote pup, and not the endangered San Joaquin kit fox.

A tiny, secretive lizard that lives in fallen Joshua tree limbs and other tight cover.

A rough-scaled fence-and-rock lizard, often the other skinny lizard on a chuckwalla boulder.

A burrow spider you mostly notice in fall, when males walk the roads in daylight looking for a mate.

California’s state reptile, federally threatened, and mostly underground. A backyard pet is a legal and biological mistake.

The pack rat: the stick-mound builder under a Joshua tree or in a shed, not a kangaroo rat.

A harmless constrictor that mimics a rattlesnake — the usual “is that a rattler?” in a yard.

The fast, big-headed lizard with a black neck collar, on the same rocks as chuckwallas.

A real bird that runs down lizards in the yard. The cartoon version is faster and less interested in your snakes.

The night hopper that can live without a drink. On creosote flats here, Merriam’s is the one you usually mean.

A dangerously venomous rattlesnake that shares the basin with sidewinders and does not need horns.

A wide-ranging cat on the same corridor; residents almost never see one, and should not feed deer.

The large-eared deer of canyon edges and the Morongo Valley corridor, mostly at dusk.

A crested black songbird tied to desert mistletoe. Here for the cool months, often gone by deep summer.

The smaller, scuttling seed-eater next to a kangaroo rat — several species, one field habit.

A yellow-and-black songbird that nests in Joshua tree and yucca crowns in the warm months.

A small rattlesnake of sandy washes, named for the track it leaves. One of several venomous snakes in this basin.

The small moth that pollinates Joshua trees; without it the trees do not set seed.