Tegus are on the march in South Georgia. Locals’ guns are cocked and loaded.

A black and white Argentine tegu (pronounced TAY-goo), to be precise. The lizard is one of the latest invasive species to move into our state.

For almost a decade, a low-level war against Salvator merianae has been taking place in Tattnall and Toombs counties, three hours south of Atlanta. State officials, with the help of scientists, university professionals and locals, have led the fight. They’ve used traps, rifles and shotguns, tracking them from one community to the next.

One guy blasted a tegu with his 12-gauge, but only managed to blow off its tail; the creature legged it and vanished, possibly resurfacing two months later and 20 miles away under a horrified woman’s house. A farmer unrolled his truck window and sent a tegu to the hereafter with a single shot. Others have followed their neighbors’ example. In South Georgia, with the blessing of DNR, it’s open season on tegus.

A Lyons resident reported the first Georgia tegu sighting in 2017. Now, nine years into the tegus-humans conflict, Gillis and others who track the big lizards admit that their foe is like kudzu.

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

For a while, said Gillis, tegu sightings dwindled as people fought back against the unwanted lizards. Could Homo sapiens have won the interspecies conflict?

“I said, ‘We’ve closed the door’” on tegus, said Gillis, a DNR supervisor who oversees a 12-county region.

This summer has changed his mind.

“They have come back with a vengeance.”

Welcoming environment

Georgia is no stranger to invasive animals and plants. In recent years, Joro spiders, native to Asia, have spun webs across North Georgia. Feral hogs for decades have rooted in forests, fields and backyards, destroying property and habitat. Nearly everyone has a coyote story. And, of course, there is kudzu — always creeping, rarely sleeping.

But the preponderance of the sightings is down here, where Tattnall and Toombs share a county line. DNR estimates it has logged about 40 tegu complaints in the two-county area. The state agency, with help, has trapped 15. Somewhere between 40 and 50 have been killed either by DNR or private citizens, or hit by cars. The numbers offer an unmistakable conclusion: The area, known for corn, peanuts and cotton, renowned for Vidalia onions, is fertile ground for tegus, too.

That’s hardly surprising. Tegus can swim like Olympic champions; Tattnall and Toombs are crisscrossed with creeks, ditches and rivers, and irrigation ponds dot the landscape. Food? Tegus are omnivores; the area’s forests offer a cornucopia of wild berries, small creatures and ground-nesting birds. They also love eggs, as chicken owners have discovered. Habitat? Gillis notes that tegus excel in traveling in underbrush; the woods down this way are tangles of green.

Nor do they have to worry about colder weather. Tegus brumate, meaning they become semidormant when the days get shorter and cooler. Biologists expect them to enter this period by late September. For the rest of the year, they will seemingly vanish.

Tegus, native to Argentina and other South American nations, have adapted. Their reluctant hosts also have had to.

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

‘They’re smart’

In 2018, Lance McBrayer, a professor and curator of herpetology at Georgia Southern University, got an inquiry from an official with the U.S. Geological Survey. Would he be interested in documenting the spread of tegus in South Georgia? The federal agency, charged with keeping track of invasive species nationwide, needed someone close to the action. McBrayer, who focused on the big lizards for his master’s thesis, didn’t hesitate.

For more than two years, McBrayer, using about $150,000 in federal money, hired a reptile technician and a handful of undergraduate students to set out traps. They baited them with eggs, a tegu favorite. They also created a list of sightings, learning about tegu habits and habitat as they fielded one call after another. The funding ran out, but not before McBrayer and his charges had added to the state’s knowledge of tegus.

He likens them to raccoons — adaptable, willing to eat just about anything. And this: “They’re smart.”

Tegus usually keep a low profile near and sometimes under houses, he said. (More on that in a bit.) And if a tegu decides life near humans is too risky, said McBrayer, “in the wilds of South Georgia, there are literally millions of acres.”

Credit: Jessi Esparza / AJC

Credit: Jessi Esparza / AJC

Like Gillis, McBrayer allowed himself a moment of optimism a few years ago as word spread about tegus and residents acted accordingly.

“We depressed the population … but we didn’t get them all,” he said. The recent discovery of young tegus has confirmed what McBrayer feared most. “Now they’re beginning to reproduce.”

What now? People closest to the tegus need to take things into their own hands, he said. “They seem to be willing to do just that.”

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

‘Weirdest thing’

Richard Smith keeps a shotgun leaning against the fireplace at his home on a dirt road that snakes through a long, green expanse of woodland. Near it is a box of 12-gauge shells. He wants to be ready.

Smith encountered his first tegu several years ago when his son-in-law called. He’d come across a lizard, a big lizard, the younger man said. Smith, intrigued, went to check it out.

“That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

That first sighting wouldn’t be the last. Smith has trapped two tegus in his yard, close to his chickens. He killed both.

Curious about their eating habits, Smith sliced open the belly of one. He discovered hatchling box turtles, grapes, blackberries and what appeared to be the remains of a rat. He shared his findings with Gillis.

“I have you on speed-dial,” he told Gillis.

Smith worries about whip-poor-wills, ground-nesting birds whose quavering calls signal dusk’s approach. He’s always listened for them. Nights, these days, come quietly. Smith fears that tegus have decimated their numbers.

“They’re one of my favorite things,” he said. “It’s a terrible situation, really.”

Jason Braddy has no use for tegus, either. He farms about 2,000 acres on tracts where they’ve been sighted. On a recent afternoon, he and Gillis stood on the edge of a corn field, the sky piled with clouds, comparing notes. A neighbor saw one on his porch and shot it. Guys raking pine straw chased and killed another. Folks killed two not far from where they stood. And so on.

Their tally? Six tegus, all sighted in July and August. They know more are out there, unseen.

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

“We’ll do what we can, I guess,” said Braddy, who says he once shot a tegu from his truck with a .22-caliber rifle while driving to a restaurant with his brother. “But it might be like the armadillos.”

Another invasive species, the armadillo has moved into South Georgia. It’s doing just fine.

A close encounter

Gillis remembers the call from an agitated homeowner in Providence, a community a few miles south of Lyons. A big something had grabbed his cat by the neck and was thrashing it from one side to the other, trying to kill it, the caller said.

The homeowner grabbed his shotgun, he told Gillis. The creature saw the man and dropped the cat. It started running. The man leveled his 12-gauge, loaded with BB-sized birdshot. Boom! In an instant it was gone, leaving behind only a shattered piece of tail.

(The cat survived.)

Gillis saw the tail and knew: tegu. Two months passed, and Gillis had forgotten about the armed encounter.

Then his phone rang again — this time, the caller was a woman in Vidalia, about seven miles away. A long-tailed and scaly creature had just run through her flower bed, she told Gillis. It leapt three feet and vanished in the cool darkness under her house.

Her request was urgent, heartfelt: Could he please visit? Like, right away?

Gillis drove to Vidalia, figuring the caller had mistaken the leaping lizard for something smaller. Surely tegus hadn’t migrated as far as Vidalia?

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

Credit: Mark Davis for the AJC

He changed his mind when he reached the woman’s home. He saw a grooved track in the dirt, flanked on either side by claw marks: yes, a tegu. He eyed the home’s opening. Tracks went in, tracks came out. The lizard appeared to have come and gone.

Meantime, a friend of the homeowner stopped by. She brought her son, who was 11. No one noticed him slip under the house.

Gillis was heading to his truck when he heard the boy holler. “I see him! I see him!” Gillis crouched at the crawl space opening where the boy had vanished and tossed the kid his phone. “Here,” he said, “take a picture.”

The kid did as he was told and tossed the phone back. Gillis gawked. The creature on its screen was nearly the size of the boy. It looked displeased.

He turned to the homeowner and the mom. “You might want to get him out from under there.”

The boy scooted out. Gillis, armed with a looped snare, crept into the crawl space’s twilight. He saw it in the gloom.

“It was a big ol’ tegu,” he said. “It was backed into the corner.”

Gillis dropped a loop, attached to a pole, over its head. Then he pulled it tight.

It was like yanking a thunderbolt. The tegu scuffled, scrabbled, kicked up dust, hissed. “It destroyed nearly all the phone wires under the house,” he said. Gillis hung on, pulled, started backing out, pulled some more, and finally emerged with the largest tegu he’d ever seen — about 4 ½ feet of indignant lizard.

“The jowls on that thing!” he recalled.

Word got around about the tegu, the boy and the fracas under the house. The local newspaper showed up and took a picture of the kid. The photo depicts a youngster standing straight as a longleaf pine, resplendent in camo. His face has the slightest hint of a smile.

The tegu? Gillis euthanized it. Curious about what it may have eaten, he began skinning it. What he found near the tail left him stunned.

Part of its tail was new growth, he realized. Around the tail were small pieces of lead — birdshot. Could this be the tegu that tried to eat the cat, two months earlier and 20 miles away?

“I can’t know for sure,” he said. “But it did have part of its tail regrown, and it did have bird shot.”

And, not for the first time, Gillis knew that South Georgia has a guest that has no intention of going anywhere.

For more information about tegus, see https://georgiawildlife.com/tegus

To report a sighting, call 478-994-1438, email gainvasives@dnr.ga.gov, or go online, gainvasives.org/Argentine-black-and-white-tegu