I was down at the lake the other day doing some tests, which you’ll hear more about eventually, and noticed that there appeared to have been a mass emigration from the waters recently. Along the lake edges, the sand would suddenly hop away at my approach – not all of it, mind you, just certain select and very small portions. I had the long lens affixed and was reluctant to change it out due to potentially imminent sightings of something that actually required the focal length, so at a given opportunity I used it anyway to aim down at these curiously mobile patches of sand.
Unless I miss my guess, this is an American toad, only wait! There have been more taxonomical shenanigans, and it’s now more accurate to say this is an eastern American toad (Anaxyrus americanus americanus) – there are now three recognized subspecies, and naturally, one of them had to be an eastern one, because someone’s mad about that airline going defunct.
Some idea of the scale can be discerned through the size of the grains of sand – I wouldn’t say these guys were more than a few days past tadpole stage, and really, there were a lot of them. But I only did a handful of frames and have nothing else to tie it in with, postwise, so it’ll be here all alone – sand-colored toad against a sand background against a sand blog background. Hopefully you’re reading this over a sandwich…