PHOENIX — “We've had people come from England that have actually come looking for chuckwallas," South Mountain Park Ranger Samantha Nickel said, standing outside the ranger station.
"Yeah, they're kind of cool," she said.
But it's not just a regular, run-of-the-mill chuckwalla that is bringing people from across the pond. It's a rare chuckwalla that only lives in a city park in Phoenix.
Chuckwallas themselves are fairly common: They're a big lizard that's found all over the country. But the ones that live at South Mountain Park have an orange tail that looks like a carrot.
“They're only found here," Nickel said. "And it's Arizona's second largest lizard."
The biggest being the Gila monster. But those are found all over the desert.
The carrot-tailed chuckwalla is landlocked to the park. It won't — and really can't — go anywhere else.
The Arizona Game and Fish Department said the red tail is probably a genetic quirk that just stuck around because chuckwallas don't really travel. The genes don't mix much.
“Chuckwallas rarely cross the intermediate flat area because it's dangerous for them," Tom Jones with Arizona Game and Fish said. "They're rock dwellers.”
They're rock dwellers out of necessity, Jones said. They're not meat eaters, but they do have teeth and can bite — though probably not that hard. They do have claws, but mainly for crawling up rocks. So the only defense mechanism they have is to crawl in the space between rocks and puff themselves up.
That makes it harder for predators to pull them out of there and eat them. Because of that, they don't really get off the rock or go into neighborhoods. And South Mountain Park is pretty much landlocked with neighborhoods.
Which ironically, makes the carrot-tailed chuckwallas easy to find.
“Because they are orange-tailed and unique, they present kind of a temptation to those who might want to collect these animals and keep them for themselves," Jones said.
And yes, people do try to take them as pets. But harassing, grabbing or taking a carrot-tailed chuckwalla is illegal in Phoenix. They're protected inside the city limits. And since they don't live anywhere else, the entire population is protected by law.
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