Toad World

Life goes on around us whether we notice it or not.

And if I say that some very, very long time after the very first beginning I built my little garden pond, should I imagine that the toads that live there now think about me?

In early April I heard the first one trill his mating song. Then a few days ago, the sun bright and warming my back, I watched a large toad, Bufo americanus, sitting on a rock at the water’s edge. He expanded his vocal sac like a brownish grape and called out a long high trill. Then, a smaller toad swam up and climbed out on the rocks. The larger toad scuttled behind the smaller one and they bumped up the rocks until they were hidden in the yarrow. Some time later they partly emerged from the yarrow fronds, looking back out over the pond, still joined together, male and female, after their kind, only now I saw the smaller one on top of the larger.

Last spring, I saw two toads sitting out on the stones one evening, inflating their throats and trilling their call. You could hear them – going at it – well into the night, even with the windows of the house shut. And then one day in the early summer - in perhaps every cubic inch of my roughly 10,000 cubic inch pond - there was one tiny dark tadpole wriggling or resting in nearly every cubic inch of water. When I first spied them in the late afternoon sun, it looked more like a million.

So were the Adam and Eve of their species formed out of the dirt around the pond? Or did they hop all the way over from Mary’s Lake? More likely, some toad eggs attached onto the legs of a bird where toads were already established and then were washed into the world I had created. But what about clear back at the very beginning, before even that first single-celled organism - how? and what of all that followed? and why? My mind nearly boggles at what I can see in my own little pond with my own eyes when I open them. There’s hardly a word for my astonishment at life going all the way back to the very beginning of creation.

I assume that considerably less goes on in a toad’s mind than in my own. Questions of beginnings, what it all means and such – that’s more of a homo sapiens thing. But I’m also not so far from the toad world when you think about it.

Food and shelter. Singing and mating. Sitting in the sun, looking out over the water.

And a few days after the mating I witnessed, I spotted a strand of toad eggs in the pond. Most of last year’s tadpoles apparently didn’t make it, but I expect to see another generation making a go of it soon.

Creatures we all are. Making the most of a life we can’t possibly fully understand.


Postscript: This morning I saw black cumin seed-sized tadpoles along the egg strands. One wiggled it's tail, probably not at me.