Tadpoles In A Pond

Finally!!! Its here!!!

Yes, the highly anticipated release of my movie, "Tadpoles In A Pond", is now available for viewing on YouTube. Well... the clamor isn't quite so big as Spiderman 3, but my cousin, M, did send me an email in which she mentioned that she was looking forward to seeing my tadpole movie. And, relatively speaking, that qualifies as high anticipation to me!

First, a history of our tadpoles:
It all began innocently enough back in April of 2006. The hubby was digging in our yard (an everyday occurence for us... nothing special there). He as hoping to create a pond along our "stream" - which is essentially a ditch dug through our property that we flood with water from a hose. He accidentally left the hose running through the night, which filled the hole with water. No problem, except that a couple of opportunistic western toads (Bufo boreas) decided to breed. We awoke the next morning with strings of toad eggs scattered throughout the pond.

Here's a photo the string of eggs from this year's toads. There are so many eggs laid by a single pair, they extend throughout our little 10 x 4 ft pond. What a producer that female was!

** Important hint => if you place the cursor over the photo and left-click, you can see a larger version of the picture. This is the case for all the photos in my blog. Sorry, forgot to mention that earlier...

Well, after we found the eggs in the flooded hole last year, as concerned animal lovers, we HAD to keep watering the area and keep the little guys and gals alive. It was an interesting science experiment, and we got a lot of enjoyment out of it (in addition to more toads in our yard, a bunch of dragonfly larvae - many of whom ate most of our tadpoles - and even some mayfly larve. Exciting times!).

By the way... yes, we do live in the desert, but the toads were already there. The hubby had a tiny pond in the yard (3x2 ft black plastic tub type) for about 10+ years and the toads had already appeared for that. We've got cottonwood trees for shade and through the years have planted assorted rushes and reeds. The cattails showed up on their own. All in all, the toads have got a pretty sweet deal in our yard.

After the toads, mayflies and dragonflies all metamorphosed into their terrestrial adult forms, the pond was drained and further excavation (deepening, widening, and lengthening) was conducted over the winter time. This spring, we were ready for toad action. And act they did!!!


Can you see all the egg strings in that second photo?

Two weeks later... we had tadpoles!!!! And therefor, "Tadpoles In A Pond". Now, I admit, the video is oh-so amateur. I moved the camera too quickly. The resolution drops when uploaded onto YouTube; they just look like a bunch of blobs with tails. But, hey, that's sort of what they look like in real life anyway.

So... with no further adoo, I present to you my movie for your immense enjoyment, "Tadpoles in our Pond":


I recommend you browse YouTube further (edited in later: only web virgins haven't surfed YouTube these days! So if you haven't, start with these:) I recommend it, because there are so many other wonderful videos to see, such as Nora, the piano playing cat, or clips of Bill Maher's New Rules (however, I would only recommend the latter for those of you who are left-leaning and not easily offended. If either of these are the case, just stick to watching Nora the cat. Or maybe you can watch a cool real-life version of the Simpson's TV show intro. I like that one, too).

Enjoy!