Toad Away

Well this is the last of the critters from my trip. I had hoped to have more critters but they just weren't there. Although, I will have a post about the doe that my son helped feed a bit later. I was disappointed that I did not see more birds and such, they just were not in to mood to be seen or when they were visible it was so fast that you did not have the time to move the camera into position before they were out of sight again. I could hear them everywhere and I think that is why I was so disappointed that I didn't see many of them. This toad is actually a little toad that we saw on the trip home. He was in the rocks at the gas station that we had to pull over in because my baby was hungry and since we switched him to the big boy car seat he doesn't do well drinking his bottle without someone holding it. He sits up more in the seat and doesn't tip the bottle back far enough. Needless to say we have a mess right now when he does it himself. Now that I have bored you with that bit of information let's get back to the toad. At first I thought he might be one of the rocks so I had my two cousins go over and check it out, sure enough I was right he was a toad and not a rock. So my youngest cousin picked him up and hence we have her hand in the picture. This is the second toad that I have seen this year but I have to admit I don't really look for frogs and toads. At least not yet I don't. I remember growing up I saw them everywhere. We lived next to a crick (drainage ditch). It actually ran right through our backyard cutting it in half well actually it cut the back yard up so that we had one fourth of the yard behind the house and three fourths of the back yard on the other side. We actually owned one of the largest lots on the street but it seemed so much smaller because the majority of our yard was not easily accessible. The way the crick ran through there was actually room to have put another house on the land between the house on the west side of us and us but the crick would have ran in the front yard so we each had a lot and a half of land. But now that I said all that we would have frogs and toads all around when I was younger. I loved hearing the bullfrogs growing up. And as I was searching for the type of toad this was I realized listening to the sounds that some of the noise I remember from childhood were actually from the frogs and toads and not the cicada bugs like I had thought they always were. Oh and I found out this is an American Toad.

The sign is from the Sarett Nature Center and the toad was found at the Galesburg gas station exit 85 off I-94. I loved the sign when I saw it and thought I would share it with you. Also if you hadn't figured it out I am a stream of conscious writer, so forgive me for my ramblings.



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