I’ve heard them described as “tiny dinosaurs”. This is a male and he is particularly vivid green so it looks like it’s breeding time. There’s a slight swelling at the underside base of the tail indicating his, ummmm, readiness to mate. Females are not quite so green and get a series of red bands along the side when it’s breeding season . She will generally produce about 13 eggs.
They are known as fierce predators and will eat insects, other lizards, small rodents (!!!), berries, and leaves. They have been observed running on hind legs to capture prey – another reason I’m glad they don’t grow to 6 feet. Their range is quite large – from Missouri, Texas, through the western states. There also are the Mojave collared lizard and the Great Basin collared lizard – and others in Mexico.
And they are fast! Collecting them can be quite the chore. There is no way you are going to capture them by hand so you have to resort to the handy herpetologist trick of yes, the lizard noose. This is a length of dental floss, narrow fly line, or small gage wire attached to a stick of say, 3-4 feet long, with a noose at the end. Some folks use the upper end of a fly rod or something similar. For some reason the lizard does not perceive the noose slowly moved towards them as a threat. So you just slip it over their neck give a slight tug to tighten and lift their front feet of the ground, and grab them with the other hand. Once I was using this to capture critters as big as desert iguanas in the Saline Valley of CA, but some smaller lizards were pretty aggressive and just kept jumping up to the noose and trying to bite it. Very uncooperative.