The trash can that sits next to the outside door to Walkabout Studios, used primarily for the stinky trash that resin printing produces, has claimed another capture. For reasons unknown, wildlife keeps getting into the can only to be discovered later, and now it’s a semi-regular feature.
This was the find a couple of days ago:
Okay, this one isn’t too surprising – certainly less so than a turtle or a crayfish – but it’s still curious how many things get in there. I might have this figured out, though. The sides of the semi-buried stairwell are brick walls surmounted by latticework that begins just above ground level, and the lattice might be just wide enough to admit the passage of the turtle, certainly enough for the other things that have gotten in there. So what might be happening is, the critters are wandering around and get into the space by my rear windows, following the wall along until they get to the latticework that forms a right-angle to the wall and windows, and then crawl through. This makes plenty of sense with this southern toad (Anaxyrus terrestris,) specimens of which are found each night hunting insects by the windows, along with the green treefrogs and Copes grey treefrogs. Those, however, could easily climb out of the Magic Bucket should they find themselves within.
This one, not so much.
That’s a pretty fat toad, perhaps testament to the number of insects that it’s been catching at my windows, and not a wonder that it couldn’t leap out. Which is being unkind – it would take a near-vertical leap and I’m not sure they can do this. But this pic also shows the large pair of ‘warts’ that distinguish this from the American toad, sitting above and behind the eardrums and more reddish than the rest of the coloration. Too many earlier images on the blogareenie here have been misidentified as American toads when they were actually southern; I blame this on both my ID source claiming that southerns couldn’t be found in my (previous) area, and my own failure to check identifying characteristics because of this.
But that’s not all for the Magic Bucket of Variety, since it produced another capture early this morning – that one will appear later on, likely Friday.