The sleeping child wakes up
In the dry thornscrub of Guatemala's Motagua Valley lives one of the rarest lizards on Earth, the Guatemalan beaded lizard, known locally as the niño dormido, the sleeping child, for its shy, drowsy ways. Habitat loss and the illegal pet trade have whittled the wild population down to an estimated five to seven hundred adults. So La Aurora Zoo in Guatemala City has become the species' nursery: remote cameras watch over every new egg, incubator tanks hold the hatchlings, and keepers teach the young to feed and climb.
Next year the graduates move to large open enclosures inside their own thornscrub, a halfway house between the nursery and the wild, and then out entirely, with scientists following their progress. It is patient, humble work, a few eggs at a time, in one dry valley most of the world has never heard of. Which is exactly what saving a species usually looks like.
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