A Hop Away
Here in the Midwest, we’re big on goodbyes. A typical Midwest Goodbye is an elaborate dance, featuring time honored moves such as saying “Well!”, sucking in breath through your teeth, and asking one or two questions on the way out just to be polite. But how do you say goodbye to a toad, even if he is from the Midwest?
If you’re a toad reading this, please leave a comment, but in the meantime, I’ll have to make my own assumptions. In my experience, a toad goodbye looks like this: the toad makes eye contact and decides if you’re a bug or not. Then the toad blinks – this is either because the toad is very sad to say goodbye and is fighting tears, or because the humidity is not quite optimal, and his eyes are getting sticky – it’s hard to say. Lastly, the toad will hop once, twice, and then pause for a final look back. This is the toad’s way of sighing with sadness, and also confirming that you really aren’t a bug after all (they’re not big on object permanence). Once your toad has said his goodbye, you are free to let the waterworks flow.
After seven toad goodbyes, my tear ducts have had quite the workout. The first one was the hardest. Big Chungus quickly grew his back legs, the little toes developing as his tail stayed stubbornly glued to his butt. I kept a close eye on his development and worried a lot. Frog raising experts online report that young pollywogs (the scientific term for an amphibian that is halfway between a tadpole and an adult) can drown easily. Once their front legs develop, the gills they’ve used to breathe start to dissolve back into their flesh and they develop lungs. If they can’t find land before their lungs replace their gills, they won’t be able to breathe.
Big Chungus, halfway between tadpole and toad. Note the small bulges on his side - those are his soon to be absorbed gills.
I knew I had to prepare my 20-gallon tank for the metamorphosis of Big Chungus by providing him a place to crawl out of the water. I added a lily pad, burying its thick tuber in the gravel, but within a few weeks it had died, devoured by snails. Meanwhile, two front legs popped out of Big Chungus’ torso. Within a day, he was no longer a rotund tadpole, but an aerodynamic amphibian, ready to conquer the land. I had to act fast.
I set out on a walk with a vague idea of what I needed. I wandered around the park near my house and found some nice sheaves of bark. Maybe Chungus could climb out on a floating surface? I also picked up some sheets of moss to serve as the plush carpet of the “Toadrarium” I was building for Chungus. Battling my way through a slice of buckthorn-choked woodland, I stumbled upon a shallow pit, and a pile of rocks. The rocks were out of place, brought there by whoever had dug the pit. Neighborhood kids? An urban witch? I didn’t stick around to investigate – I loaded my backpack with rocks and hiked home.
Once stacked in the aquarium, the rocks provided a small solid surface for Chungus to climb out on. I just hoped I would be present when he emerged. I didn’t trust him not to throw himself back in the water and drown. A few days later, Isaac and I noticed Big Chungus acting erratically. He was hanging out on the bottom of the tank and then sprinting upward, crashing into the walls, changing direction, and then falling back to the bottom.
“I’ve got to help him,” I told Isaac.
“Are you sure?”
I popped the lid off the tank and did my best to herd Big Chungus toward the pile of rocks. After some frustrated maneuvering (and an arm covered in duckweed) I got him onto the solid surface. Phew!
He promptly jumped back in the water.
“Maybe he’s not ready,” Isaac advised, and I decided to agree.
“I’ll give him another couple of hours to figure himself out.”
Hours later I was still pacing the living room, watching Big Chungus rocket around the tank, his hairs-breadth arms and legs inefficiently paddling back and forth. He didn’t look happy. It was time to deploy the Toadrarium, which I had decked out in moss, tiny stone figurines, and a water dish made out of a jam jar lid. I scooped Chungus out of the 20-gallon tank and plopped him in the Toadrarium’s water dish, thinking that if he stayed in the water, I would know that he wasn’t yet ready for a life on land.
He hopped right out, and onto the moss. I’ve tried to imagine what it must feel like to leave the water and breathe air for the first time. Big Chungus, despite his name, was smaller than a fingernail when he hopped into the Toadrarium. No doubt the air felt cold on his fragile limbs; when taking his first breath, his lungs would have stuttered, unpracticed; and with his eyes open wide, he would have seen further into the world than he ever had underwater. Did he feel scared? Or awed at the power of his own transformation? How many minutes did it take him to trust the pressure of moss under his toes?
I shoved these questions to the back of my mind and focused on a more pressing concern: Chungus was surely starving. His mouth had changed from the round beak of a tadpole to the long frown of a toad, and he now had a tiny tongue that no doubt craved it’s first taste of bug. Luckily, in the heat of summer, bugs are everywhere, right?
Right and wrong. Big bugs – ants, bees, flies, roly-polies – are easy enough to spot, but all those bugs were actually bigger than Chungus himself. He needed something teensy-weensy to eat, and that presented a challenge. I spent twenty minutes standing on a chair, catching gnats by the front porch light, but for all my efforts I only caught a handful, and they didn’t want to land on the moss next to Big Chungus. I caught a mosquito and cruelly removed one of its wings to make it an easy meal, but it was almost as large as Chungus, and he was intimidated by its long legs.
Finally, while scouring my front yard (which is actually just a patch of construction-grade dirt in the alleyway in which nothing grows but weeds) I found a tiny treasure. Nestled within the tip of a Canadian Horseweed plant, was a small colony of bright green aphids. There are many species of aphid, but most of them are tiny, with even the winged adults no larger than a gnat. They’re perhaps most famous as the preferred food of ladybugs, and as the livestock to many kinds of ants, who guard aphids and drink their syrupy poop as a reward.
Oleander aphids on a milkweed leaf. I opted not to feed these aphids to Big Chungus, because Milkweed, the plant they feed on, contains compounds that are toxic to many animals.
The aphids I found were unguarded, and Big Chungus snapped them up when I dropped them in the Toadrarium. The relief I felt was immense. I didn’t want to release Big Chungus without lunch in his belly. But I did have to release him – with seven more tadpoles in the tank and only one Toadrarium, I knew he would have to vacate the real estate. Plus, there were only a few more aphids in my yard, and I didn’t want to spend another couple hours trying to catch gnats.
I waited until the weekend, when my friend Julian was visiting, to release Big Chungus. Isaac tagged along, and after jumping a few fences, the three of us found a spot in the woods near Lake Harriet that I knew would be the perfect home for Chungus.
Big Chungus takes his first steps into his new home on the forest floor.
I picked him out of the Toadrarium delicately, his aphid-stuffed body still no larger than a sunflower seed, and set him down by a large rotting log, which I imagined to be teeming with tiny edible bugs. Chungus hopped toward the log, not stopping to look back. Within a moment he was indistinguishable from the other tiny moving parts of the forest floor. I let out a breath, looked around with approval at his new home. I thought about his odds of survival, as one tiny toad in a world full of animals with mouths large enough to swallow him. But I couldn’t keep him – I had more pollywogs to tend, and besides, his eyes were already shining with visions of a million bugs.