Stewardship

“Give me your arm, old Toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.”

Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)

Stewardship

I took the frogs from him because he almost let the cat eat them. He was too young to have them. A three-year old, no matter how big or insistent, should not be trusted with any animal as a pet. Perhaps it was because he is my last child, a beautiful son. He is the son I felt kick and twist for months within me, the only son who would cry until he was returned to my arms. I indulged him. I sighed and relented when he first begged me to buy the frogs. They are not frogs, in fact, but it was what he called them. “Fahgs,” he had said. It was his fifth or sixth word, after “Mama” and “ball”. Toads is easier to say, but once his mouth had formed fahgs, it was always fahgs. They are bombina orientalis, or fire bellied toads. He chose them because they were “So pretty!”, thus illustrating the beauty in the eye of the beholder aphorism. What is initially endearing about them, even to me, is their size. They are the smallest of all known toads. He has a predilection for reptiles and amphibians that one day I am confident scientists will prove is genetic. Every male in my immediate family has a fascination with all things herpetological.

“No, you left the lid off again, and the cat was up here just now terrorizing them.” He was wringing his small hands, frustrated, pleading his case. “I won’t next time! Next time, Mom!” But I was firm and told him that he would be able to visit them whenever he wanted. It is also part of his nature to face accountability without rancor, an unfathomable gift for a parent. “Mmkay,” he stood watching as I hefted the ten-gallon glass aquarium down the hall to my room. “I sleep witchu at night.”

I had to acquiesce to this inconvenient request; no executioner can deny a doomed man a final request. That night he lay on his little sleeping mat next to the now tightly-lidded aquarium. The night was cool outside, and I had cracked the window slightly for fresh air. His body lay unmoving, relaxed with the wispy drowse that settles on toddlers late in the evening. I lay quietly myself wondering about his innate love for such unappealing animals.

When he was just two years old and not really walking well, we stayed at the Grand Lake Lodge in Estes Park, about an hour’s drive from home. After dinner in the lodge, we were walking carefully, stolidly, up deep, long steps that carve the hillside behind the lodge. Our cabin was far at the back of the grounds, just abutting the RockyMountainNational Park. I found myself dragging him all at once; he was stuck on one of the huge steps, still as could be. He murmured something to himself and seemed preoccupied with the step itself. “What is it, bubby?” My friend walked close behind him and stopped, too. “He’s found something, I think,” she called up. We all three crouched over the step, and in the obscurity we could just make out the faint lines of what looked like an immensely fat lizard. I immediately recoiled, but my son reached down and picked it up. He looked at us both and quite unmistakably said, “Newt.” We stared. Again, he said it. Clearly, distinctly. “Newt.”

We laugh about it now, his early scientific vocabulary, but it still seems preternatural; to me it even has an odd boding to it. To be sure, his father has no fear of snakes whatsoever. Perhaps my son has some double-winged or tipped chromosome. He has my family’s male gene and his father’s—genome researchers in the future might call it the herpetology gene. When the cat began bringing in garter snakes as presents for the family, it was my son who would scoop them up, their bodies excreting, out of fear, some vile liquid all over his hands. He doesn’t flinch or jump when handling the little toads in the aquarium, and I suspected it was just this activity that caused him to leave the lid off that day.

I heard a small, sweet sound as I lay there, my son on his sleeping mat and his toads nearby. I wondered if he was talking in his sleep, but I recognized a rhythm to the noise as well. “Oooop, oooop, oooop.” Then a pause. A silence rested heavily in the room. Then:  “Ooooop, oooop, oooop.” I thought it came from outside the window, but it certainly sounded closer. My son shifted a bit and twisted his head in my direction. “Hear ‘em, Mom? Hear da fahgs? They sing at night.” I climbed carefully out of bed and over his mat to peer in. It was quite dark. I couldn’t see anything, but the noise most decidedly emanated from the tank. “Is ’cause he loves her,” he said to me. “They’re happy.” This information had to have come from his father, I thought. But the next time I was at the pet store I asked the owner about the ooooping. “Your toads are makin’ noise to each other?” he asked in slight surprise. I nodded and imitated the noise. “Wow,” he nodded in apparent admiration. “Watch out for egg sacs, then. They must like the environment you’ve set up.”

We did find egg sacs, but they never came to fruition, due to my meddling, unfortunately. Soon after I moved the toads to my room, I decided that if they were to stay (and I very much came to enjoy their nightly ooooping lullabies), their tank would have to be made a bit less noisome. Fire bellied toads are pond dwellers, and part of the pond environment is, of course, scum. The same pet store fellow who admired my happy toads listened carefully to my complaints regarding smelly pond scum. He prescribed a bottle of liquid scum, essentially, whereby just a few drops would ensure viscous water that was also clear and less fragrant.

My son was in a half day pre-school program, and I took the fleeting two and half hours to tackle the aquarium. I carefully dumped the whole container into a large soaking tub in the master bathroom. I added cold water so that the tub contained a full three inches of water, a veritable lake for the two. Once they realized that there was now depth in the water, not just wet rocks and a bit of shallow water to step in, they swam for joy. I knelt next to the tub watching them propel their bright green bodies through the water using tiny arms and legs. The bright orange that colors their underbellies was visible as they threw their arms behind them. Their legs were flung straight out behind them, the bright orange flashing through the water, as they lifted their heads, bright black eyes just above the water line. And what can I tell you in my defense? It was a moment. I found myself there on my knees, tears in my eyes, feeling so very happy for the toads. I was witnessing tangible, palpable joy.

It was after this that I rearranged the tank to include a large bank of rocks and foliage. It provided a five or six inch ledge, if you will, from which the toads could jump into a pool of water for swimming. I bought real aquatic plants. As they watched me, my husband asked my son, “Whose toads are these? Yours or hers?”

I loved them. I began to read articles about them and even requested books about them, although I still hated certain tasks involved in their care such as feeding them crickets.

When I was a girl, my brother once threw a gargantuan grasshopper into my long, already-tangled hair. The hideous experience of a four inch long insect with barbed legs stuck in the nest of my hair is as fresh today as ever. Bombinas are carnivorous, as are most of their order. Crickets must be “dusted” with a special calcium powder to ensure proper nutrition for the toads, and I simply couldn’t do it. My son would march into the pet store and often pulled the cardboard egg carton of crickets out himself without even asking for an employee’s help. Once home, he’d shake the powder inside the bag. I couldn’t help thinking about what a horrible death for the crickets, death by asphyxiation. But that’s false, too. Crickets don’t breathe through their pores as we do, and as the little fire bellied toads do. The toads hydrate themselves through their skin as well, never having to stop for a drink. It’s equally clear that toads are therefore very sensitive to their environment. A herpetologist, Robert H. Kaplan, has written no less than twelve articles on my little friends, the fire bellied toads. “Frogs are tough survivors,” he writes. “But they are also delicate, responsive to the immediate environment, so they act as a symbol. It is clear that their decline is our fault. There is no doubt about their decline, and it is very, very serious.” This sensitivity to the air and water and temperature around them became breathtakingly clear for me and my son one year.

His (my) fire bellied toads were by now three years old, full adults and a quarter of the way through their life expectancy. My scientist son still believed in Santa Claus at age 5 and wrote his Christmas list out very carefully before mailing it. “I don’t want any toyes. Plez leev a trip for Mom and me to Costa Rica.” Everyone had to forego textile gifts that year, much to his teenaged sisters’ chagrin. Frequent flyer miles and an uneven exchange rate landed my son an everlasting faith in Father Christmas. In Costa Rica we stayed at a long-established Quaker commune in the Bosque Nuboso, or Cloud Forest. These Quakers had special meaning for me when I was young. We were raised Quaker, and in that upbringing we had been told many times about these particular American Quakers who left the country in protest against the war, decamping entirely to Costa Rica’s Cloud Forest.

We stood in a small section of the forest, its almost astral canopy so far above us that we couldn’t make out leaves on the trees. The guide was three generations ex patria, and somewhere along the line, his kin had intermarried with the Ticos, as Costa Ricans call themselves. Tall and blond-haired, speaking in his native Spanish, he brought us to stand in front of a tree, in front of a low, small cave. He pulled photographs from his naturalist’s pack. The photo showed that very same cave and what appeared to be exactly the same tree, but it was literally teeming with tiny little golden frogs. “Son los sepillos dorados,” he said and paused patiently as we examined the photos. “No existen mas,” he said, gesturing at the cave in front of us. I asked how old the photo was, and he explained that the golden toad existed in Costa Rica as recently as 1989. It only took two seasons for it to completely disappear. Before the highly trained and dedicated naturalists of Costa Rica’s Cloud Forest could even begin to take stock of the situation, the golden frog had forever disappeared.

The primary breeding site of the golden toad was this particular cave. Conditions near or around the cave changed almost imperceptibly, according to scientists. Precipitation in the area dropped by 3 percent one year and was followed by another dry year. Apparently that was all the drought the delicate golden toad could tolerate. But even hardier toads seem to suffer small alterations in the climate. Frogs and toads are indigenous to every corner of the world except Antarctica. One imagines that they thrive in most climates, any climate. According to most scientists, frogs and toads have lived on this planet for about two hundred million years. Most frogs are found in the tropics, but toads abounded in cooler climes. That is, until recently.

In Europe, there is an inexplicable migration eastward of fire bellied toads from France and Germany to Poland and Belgium. Scientists have been unable to identify what is causing the flight. Most of those familiar with conservation efforts, including laymen such as you and me, realize that the best guess is always loss of habitat. To be sure, rampant real estate construction has not occurred in Poland and other Eastern European countries due to stagnant economies. Loss of habitat is easily identifiable in most post-industrial countries, however. In Britain, the natterjack toad and the great crested newt are declining due to the loss of lowland heath and coastal dunes, according to Dr. Tim Halliday at the Open University.

But seemingly untouched regions of the world show decline as well. In the Andes, at high altitudes, frogs that can tolerate the extremes of living there are beginning to vanish with dramatic suddenness. “You’d have frogs crawling all over one year, and the next year, none,” said William Duellman of the University of Kansas who has studied them in Peru. My young son, his toddler pleading and begging now evolved into a sophisticated cajolery, has succeeded in breaking the family No-Television-on-School-Nights rule. He persuaded me with his deeply-sworn promise to “only watch nature shows”. Walking in and out of the family room recently, I overheard Jeff Corwin warn the TV audience that “…in Western America, eighty percent of the toad population has disappeared in the last fifteen years.” If it is loss of habitat, I wonder, then how does one account for the Cascade frog that once lived in fifty ponds in the California Nevada but has only been spotted in two of those fifty last year? Those ponds still exist; the area is entirely protected from building and mining.  The temperatures haven’t fluctuated significantly from their norm. There is something more afoot.

Over twenty years ago at the 1989 World Congress of Herpetology in Canterbury, England, 1400 scientists convened for lectures on reptiles and amphibians. The ultimate finding of the congress was ominous and sinister. These scientists wrote that frogs and toads are literally an early warning signal, “bearers of a fateful message”. The world’s eco-system is suffering a depredation of astounding magnitude and swiftness.

Amphibian means having two lives, but in the toad’s case, the reference bears no similarity to the cat’s nine lives. Rather, it means that they live in two worlds. They eat both plant and insect life, and as a result they are dependent on more elements and exposed to more elements. When I put my son’s beautiful little toads into the huge bathtub to swim, I was lucky that the cool water I augmented the bath with wasn’t so over chlorinated that it killed them. With their smooth, moist skin, they are particularly sensitive to the ambient world. “They are the medium and the message,” writes Dr. David Wake, a professor of integrative biology at U.C. Berkeley. “I am a relatively cautious scientist, but I am very alarmed and feel very strongly about this decline.” Most people tacitly agree with the first part of Dr. Wake’s statement. Most of us view the world around us and note the tremendous advances, the convenient and helpful changes in medicine, technology, education. The Endangered Species Act has worked wonders for countless species. People view recycling as an expected behavior now, even though eighty percent of what can be recycled is still being carted to landfills throughout the modern world. We still see and hear birds, in fact, many more than before 1968 when DDT was mixed within farming irrigation lines and sprayed on millions of neighborhood lawns and trees. But the early warning system is blaring, its oooop, oooop, oooop, too faint for most of us to hear.

The Wyoming toad is just such an example. My son receives his best grades in, no surprise, science. His second grade project involved the Wyoming toad. The toad is slated to go extinct within the next five years unless a remedy for its illness is found. Specifically, the toad suffers from “red-leg disease” which causes the amphibians’ legs to turn red and puffy. This disease is actually caused by an infection from freshwater bacteria that the toad normally could be expected to resist. Most researchers suspect that an increase in ultra-violet radiation due to ozone depletion has caused drastic damage to the toads’ immune systems. When he was putting the finishing touches on his poster board for the science fair, my son asked for something to liven up the display. “Here’s a good quote,” I said, ever the literature lover. “Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve.” It is John Milton, describing Satan. He printed out a picture of his (my) beloved fire bellied toads and glued it next to the quote.

Later that evening I told him the quote wasn’t appropriate, but I couldn’t explain it to my just eight year old son. I had been thinking of Eve in her beautiful garden, the animalia in abundance, the flora beyond measure. I was thinking of how quickly it has disappeared, how many hundreds of thousands of species went extinct even before the first appearance of man on this planet. I remember my son, too young and green a steward to be trusted with toads, crying, “I’ll do it next time! Next time!” But there is no next time for many species. Witness the golden toad that was here one day and irremediably gone the next. The toad is no Satan; he is one of my little oooping toads, squatting next to Eve, yes, but not tempting her to do wrong. Rather, he is urging her to do right.