tadpoles on an oak leaf

There isn't a lot to be said for having to drive to the suburbs to put my time in at the day job working for the MAN. Oh, the work is fine enough, but the commute, even against the traffic, even with Democracy Now, da blues, All Things Considered to while away the time, the drive eats up an hour of my day. And that sucks.

There is no transit option because it's a suburb designed solely with the car in mind. It's residents, largely conservative educated whites who drive the other direction for jobs, moved here because they had decent jobs, decent cars, and gas was probably a buck and a quarter. One benefit though of being here is I'm only a short distance away from a area managed for wildlife. I hesitate to call it a wildlife management area, but it has trails, it's mostly wooded, it has a nice stream flowing through it, a lake, and there are no cars and very few people. Very few people. If I see one person on my daily walk, it's rarity.

But lately I've been seeing tadpoles. Thousands, if not millions of tiny tadpoles. The cricket frogs (this is a guess on my part they might be leopard frogs) fertilized a small ditch alongside a roadside. Apparently from a frog's perspective, this isn't a bad spot to leave ample evidence of your ability to procreate. Ephemeral pools don't typically have fish in them, so there aren't many predators. It's been a wet spring so the tadpoles have been having a heck of time swimming around, turning some stretches of pools almost black with sheer numbers. As the days have gotten longer and warmer and the distance between rain events longer I began to wonder what happens to the tadpoles if they don't make it long enough to crawl out on dry land? Well this week I found out. The ephemeral pool which housed the spawn of so many future generations of frogs dried up. And when it did, so did all the tadpoles. They became caviar on the oak leaves which lined the bottom of the ditch. A smear of organic matter, all dried up, with no where to go. Except to become part of the carbon and nitrogen cycles. They'll be broken down into little bits and then washed away in some future rain event. So much for the promise of the masses laid down in a ditch.