It always is a treat to see a toad or two while out on a hike. With published data in Britton, the USA and other places around the world all indicating toads, frogs and other amphibian populations are in serious decline.
This day we ran across the Western Toad: Anaxyrus boreas and we thrilled.
He sure is a bumpy little guy and was happy to let us photograph him around the edge of his pond.
A few days latter while out on hike we ran across another Western Toad just off the side of the trail resting in the tall grass.
Although this statement may not apply to everyone, for me it feels eerily strange and quite foreboding that within our life times we now consider it special to experience amphibians that were once a common experience in our childhoods.
nature has no boss 
Yes…foreboding. The climate and ecological changes are happening in slow and subtle ways. As such, it lures many people into accepting the changes as ok. Well, they aren’t ok in so many cases. Disruptions to climate and habitat cause cascading effects down the food chains.
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Hi Jim and I agree fully. There are trophic cascades that will occur that we have do not even have the data acquired to understand and probably will never have it. There are many who believe we can manage these changes with our human ingenuity. I am not so sure about that given how little we really know about the ecosystem as a whole and what we do know about human nature.
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Very true words, Mike. I grew up in Houston, and we couldn’t walk out the front door without seeing one or two. Sure don’t see many now though. Nice post!
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Thanks Rob, I grew up in the midwest and experienced the same thing.
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Same feeling here. I despair to think of future generations truly experiencing a ‘silent spring.’ What a huge loss that few seem to grasp.
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Hi Eliza, I think we are in that proverbial frog (no pun intended) in the pot of boiling water situation. I do believe that most humans (individuals) highly value nature or more appropriately all life however the monster of humanity (greed or maybe better put as the primitive brain) marches ever onward to destroy anything that gets in it’s way. Unless we come to terms with this duality of our species the rest of life will suffer dearly. It is a odd thing that this current extinction we are causing really is occurring by our choice not a meteor or other catastrophic event.
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Really makes one ponder. It isn’t logical… primitive brain indeed.
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Primitive yet who we are as humans at this time in evolution.
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I do love frogs and toads and created a toad watch , a few years ago to organise and arrange teams of people with buckets and torches to pick up thousands of toads and frogs, sitting on a warm road, in the night and save them getting run over in their thousands, and instead take them to the lake they wanted to reach. It turned out to be the biggest toad migration in the UK. I must have handled thousands of mainly common toads but also frogs. Hope it guarantees me a safe passage into heaven one day!! Ha, ha.
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Hi Paula, that sounds like a wonderful and very successful project and given the seemingly endless spate of negative research on amphibian population decline I am sure your efforts have given you safe passage.
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Here in Australia we have an introduced species, the cane toad that by its toxicity is killing our native animals both large and small. Another human error.
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I have heard about the cane toad in Australia and as you say another human error and although humans have had great success it has come at the expense of most other species on the planet and sometime that will have consequences we might not be able to adapt to.
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