Displaying male Yellow-spotted Agamas - Sabkhat Al Fasl

A trip to Sabkhat Al Fasl produced four Yellow-spotted Agama’s sitting on top of various tall bushes or dead sticks. A couple of them were displaying for mates and had bright blue throats and belly & orange tails. When approached, they quickly return to their normal colouration so I failed to capture any photographs of them in their really bright colours although a couple of shots show some bluish pattern remaining. They are a medium sized lizard about 30 centimetres in length and are also known as Blue-headed Agama for the reason mentioned above. They like sunning themselves in trees and are quite difficult to see unless they are displaying to females when they wave their heads back and forth to show off the blue pattern. Their tails are very long and thin and make up over half their body length. Males can be quite aggressive and open their mouths and make hissing noises and can give a nasty bite if you foolishly try to catch one by hand. The move extremely fast over the ground, and leave a classic lizard track which is a medium width and has a drag mark of the tail. This tail mark is not present if the animal is running as it holds the tail off the ground. There are two different lizards in the photographs below with the top photograph being one animal and the others photos a second lizard.