Photos and Text by Mark Hengesbaugh 8/14/2015
Wait. What? We [Jean and Mark] found this hiking boot print full of hundreds of Couch’s Spadefoot tadpoles on the trail to Bear Creek this morning. Every monsoon we’ve been here, the spadefoots have filled these small puddles with eggs. One female can lay 3,000, according to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, and eggs hatch in 15 hours. Then these tadpoles will have to metamorphose into froglets in two weeks. It’s a hurry-up schedule cued not by rainfall, but by thunder.
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| Jean leans in. |
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| Sasquatch was here! |
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| Survival of the fastest |
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