A beautiful desert toad

Gordy, Dennie and I were in southern Arizona. The three of us and all of the gear we thought would be needed for a 2-week trip were jammed into Gordy's little VW Bug. We had left Tucson behind an were now traveling westward on the narrow strip of pavement then known as the Ajo (pronounced Ah-ho) Road.

Now a major thoroughfare, in those long-ago days the road was seldom traveled and, on suitable nights, a herping Mecca, being crossed and recrossed by a wonderful array of reptiles.

We drove slowly, stopping to look at a glossy snake, a shovel-nosed snake, a banded gecko, a great plains toad, a Colorado River (now Sonoran Desert) toad. This was the good life for enthusiastic young herpers.

Then we came crossed a tiny creek and came into the Tohono O'odham (then Papago) Nation town of Sells. That it had recently rained was made apparent by the presence of a few puddles and a slight overflowing of the creek above its grassy banks. And from those now partially submerged emergent grasses along the freshened creek came a small but persistent chorus of "buzzing peeeents."

It took only a few minutes for us to locate several of the sources, beautiful inch and a half long green, black, and white toads. We had just met our first Sonoran Green Toads, Bufo (Anaxyrus) retiformis, arguably the most beautiful bufonid of the United States, and one that I still look up on every Arizona sojurn.

More photos under the jump...

Chorusing male Sonoran green toad in situ: Sonoran green toad:

Author, photographer, and columnist Richard Bartlett is one of the most prolific writers on herpetological subjects in the 20th century. With hundreds of books and articles to their credit, Richard and his wife Pat have spent over four decades documenting reptiles both in the field and in captivity. For a list of their current titles, please visit their page in our bookstore.