St. George » Searching for gila monsters is a bit like looking for a lost set of keys. You run around checking every nook and cranny hoping the missing item will turn up. But the search area is the desert, not your living room, and you stand a much greater chance of encountering a rattlesnake or scorpion than finding one of only three confirmed poisonous lizards in the world.

Finding a gila monster in the wild is made more difficult by the fact that the colorful lizards are active only for a few select months and even then they spend the vast amount of that time in burrows or tucked away under rocks.

Making the tough-to-find and largely misunderstood creature even more elusive is the fact that it is disappearing across its range in the southwestern United States and Mexico. In Utah, it is only found in the southern half of Washington County.

"Consider yourself very lucky if you have seen a gila monster in the wild," said Tom Webster, a community outreach coordinator with the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve in St. George, a 62,000-acre preserve created to protect rare and sensitive plants and animals. "People rarely get to see them. They spend most of their lives tucked away in rocks."

Even people who study gila monsters have a hard time finding them.

Graduate student Patrick Emblidge spent 10 months in the southwestern corner of the state, working to develop a habitat model for gila monsters for the Division of Wildlife Resources. After countless hours spent scouring the desert, peeking under rocks and ledges, and searching for tracks, Emblidge found just three gila monsters.

"They first show up in the year in February when they start hanging around the entrance of their burrows. April and May are pretty much the peak of their activity in Utah," Emblidge said while leading an excursion to try and find a gila for a photo op. "In June and July, they are nocturnal. You have a good chance of seeing one in August and through October, but by November they start to disappear."

Finding gilas is further complicated by the fact that they do not need to eat on a regular basis. While they are opportunistic and will eat when they can, the lizards can survive on three or four meals a year. When they do eat, gila monsters are most fond of eggs (reptile and bird) and small mammals like young rabbits.

The lizards are able go so long without eating because they store fat in their sausage-like tails.

Although they can be found almost anywhere in the southern half of Washington County, there are two good places to start -- the 62,00-acre Red Cliffs Desert Reserve north of St. George and Hurricane and Snow Canyon State Park northeast of Ivins. The best way to find them is to look for tracks in the sand, which Snow Canyon has in abundance. Select areas of the Red Cliffs Reserve are also sandy.

Myth of the monster

The name gila monster is most likely derived from the Gila River of southwestern New Mexico and Arizona, where the reptile was common in 1870 when the moniker was first used. Other people suggest the name came from a derivation of "helios" which means sun, according to Dan Beck, a professor in Central Washington University's department of biological services and a native Utahn, recognized as one of the foremost experts on gila monsters.

The monster part of the name was first documented in a colorful account of an encounter with one of the lizards in an article in The World of San Diego.

"Went after it with a stick, but the thundering thing instead of runnin' away like any nateral lizzard, squatted on its tail and spit at me," the article said. "I knocked it over and beat it with a club until my arm ached, but I might as well have tried to cut down a mesquit tree with a blade of grass ... and the blasted lizzard never stopped spittin."

Gilas appear somewhat ominous with their bulky heads, slow motion and unique color patterns, but Beck stresses that they are not aggressive until they fill threatened.

Beck grew up in Salt Lake and graduated from Skyline High School. As a graduate student at Utah State University in the early 1980s, Beck researched gila monsters in the St. George area. When he learned that Emblidge, who is one of his students, was interested in gila monsters, he pointed him to southern Utah.

"Everything was new and very exciting," Beck said about his adventures in the desert. He went on to write Biology of Gila Monsters and Beaded Lizards (University of California Press, $29.95), recently released in paperback and recognized as one of the best books on venomous lizards in the world.

One of the highlights of his career was watching the first documented combat mating ritual of gila monsters in Utah's Paradise Canyon outside St. George.

"They were wrestling. I thought they were mating at first. They were trying to pin each other to the ground," Beck said. "I've seen it half a dozen times in the wild and every time there was a female in a nearby shelter."

Over the course of three years, Beck identified more than two dozen different gila monsters in southern Utah. Utah's gila monsters are on the upper end of the size of the lizards. Beck documented some running more than 20 inches long.

"Back in the day, Paradise Canyon was recognized as having the highest density of gila monsters throughout the range," Beck said. "There is no doubt that has been altered by development. Gila monsters are top level predators and they depend on a healthy population of cottontail rabbits, quail and other egg-laying animals. Those animals in turn depend on a healthy Mojave desert assemblage. When you move up the food web, the impacts of development get magnified."

Beck says the future of gila monsters in the modern world can only be secured with urban planning and education.

"I'm hopeful that people can find ways to develop and live in the desert and still be able to appreciate the incredible biodiversity that make it so incredible," he said. "But the pessimistic side of me knows that development happens fast and the last thing most people think about is trying to keep venomous creatures around."

brettp@sltrib.com