Toads in the garden and in the lawn. It’s time to do some mowing, but toads come first.

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Most evergreen perennials are low to the ground, for good reason. Winterberry, pippsissewa, partridgeberry, and goldthread are all in the carpet family.
Most of us have heard that the CO2 level in Earth’s atmosphere today is higher than it’s been in a million years, but a new study, published in Geology, concludes that there’s now more CO2 than there has been in the past 23 million years. Something to think about while we fan ourselves.
The year of the toad? They seem to be everywhere, all sizes, and now trilling from ponds.
Ah, ticks. Tick repellent, pants stuffed into socks, tick checks, tick phobia. But staying indoors is not an option at this time of year.
Insect frass all over your picnic table this year? You’re not alone. Matt Ayers, an ecologist at Dartmouth is happy to see them. He writes that caterpillar abundance fluctuates by 20-fold, depending on the year. It’s all good, not an outbreak, and many different species of caterpillar are providing food for birds this year.
Sometimes, in the middle of the fronds of interrupted ferns, the leaflets are fertile and produce spores. Now these spore-producing leaflets are almost black and look as though they are deformed in some way. Not very attractive, but functionally they are fine. Just interrupted.
The green frog eggs laid at the warm edges of our pond hatched in about three days and the tiny tadpoles are nowhere to be seen.
Jefferson salamanders are the earliest vernal pool visitors, arriving even when there’s lots of ice.