A fine toady specimen

While stacking wood last weekend, Spouse stumbled upon this fine specimen of toad-dom:

I mean, really - have you ever seen a fatter toad? Larger, yes, but this dude is one wide load.

As much as I love woolly bears, I love frogs and toads even more. They're awfully cool. In captivity the American Toad can live up to 40 years, although most presumably don't last that long in the wild. And they eat garden pests, which is a very appealing characteristic. Large sections of my gardens tend to disappear overnight, to be replaced by luminous trails of slug slime, and we're often driven inside by blood-thirsty swarms of mosquitoes as we live rather near a swamp. I'm my world, the more toads, the merrier.

One of the many reasons I love Spouse? When he found this fellow he rushed into the house with it in his gloved hands, calling my name and telling me he had a present for me. I love it.

We couldn't leave Henry (so dubbed by Spouse) in the wood pile in the driveway because it needed to be stacked, and we were afraid that if we put him in the newly stacked woodpile he'd get squashed. It seemed to me that what this guy needed was a proper toad abode.

I searched through the barn and came up with an old ceramic pot that was no longer in use. Two well-placed taps with a hammer, and voila!

We nestled it into a particularly soft earthy part of the garden, and put Henry in front of it. A few minutes later, if you looked closely, all you could see were parts of his toady backside in there: