Geckos in the desert?

Not a bat, OK, but at least it's very cute. When I think of geckos, I think of moist tropical places, not the desert.

I saw this cute little desert banded gecko Coleonyx variegatus variegatus at the CSU desert field campus at Zyzzx in the Mojave National Preserve. This was on a May field trip for my herpetology class. While it wasn't a fabulous trip for wildflowers and there were few herps, we did see a nice selection. I learned how to actually look for creepy crawlies instead of avoiding them. The class seemed to mostly fall in love with the placid horny toads, though alas none of my photos did them justice. I set up my bat detector at night and recorded a bunch of calls though I haven't had a chance to analyze them yet. There was a lot of activity in the early evenings which I expect was likely to be pipistrelles. The night I recorded there was a tremendous amount of wind, so I expect that most of the hundreds of calls were not really bats.