As you may have noticed, I'm not posting as frequently these days as I was a month ago, owing mostly to my time being taken up with outdoor work, now that the weather is cooler. You may have also noticed that most of my posts have been nature photos, which I'm not exactly known for. Anyway, while doing more of said work today, I uncovered a rather fat toad.
I discovered this toad while picking up piles of sticks in the yard, as I usually sweep sticks into convenient locations while mowing, then pick up the piles later.
I'm not a herpetologist by any stretch, but I'm fairly certain that this is a common American Toad, Bufo americanus. Then again, that's according to my field guide, which is several years old. Wikipedia tells me that this species has since been moved to the genus Anaxyrus, along with Fowler's Toad (the only other toad I've ever seen). In fact, my field guide is so old that it refers to Fowler's toad as a subspecies of Woodhouse's toad.
These toads live everywhere, and as I have discovered, they occupy different environments in different climates - I'll explain. In Pennsylvania, I typically find them hopping about the forest floor. In Maryland, where I took these pictures, I typically find them in holes in the ground - I even found one living in a hole under a rock in my garden once. Maryland is much hotter and drier than Pennsylvania, and the ground in the former state is mostly clay, which is easy to dig in. "Pennsylvania soil," on the other hand, is an expression than means "solid rock." There's a good reason that "Pennsylvania shovel" is a name commonly applied to any digging tool that is obviously not a shovel, such as a pickaxe or jackhammer.
The toad hopped off my hand just as I took this picture, which is why my hand is in focus, but the toad isn't. I guess it finally got tired of being held. In any case, I ended up taking away the majority of its shelter moments later.
I checked back later, once I was done cleaning up, and the toad was nowhere to be found. Perhaps it found another hole.