Young wood frog

I went into the woods this morning, a deliciously chilly one, to hunt deliberately, and what I was after was fungi. A very knowledgeable and friendly mushroomer named Laurie Gorham was leading a walk in a nearby forest owned and managed by the North Stonington Citizens Land Alliance, and though the pickings were likely to be slim—drought is no friend of fungal abundance—we were likely to find a few species of interest. And so we did, but as I combed the leaf litter and the rest of the forest floor, along with logs and branches, for specimens, I spotted a very different kind of organism: a young Wood Frog. This adolescent, probably a male, based on his darker color, was, I'm sure, a member of the Class of 2014 and may well have spent his youth in one of the vernal pools that dot the refuge. The pools are now history—nothing more than dust and dry leaves—and, because of low water and rare rain, they weren't very nurturing this year. But it wasn't all disaster in the child-rearing department. At least one amphibian made it out. With any luck, in another year or two, it'll make it back... and enter the reproductive sweepstakes.