Visit again the locality where a week ago you heard so many toads, and what do you find? Long strings of gelatine-covered specks strewn on the bottom of the pond. These black spots are the eggs of the toad, and the gelatine is put around them to protect them and to furnish the first meal for the young polywogs.
Notes
May Sixteenth
To find a hummingbird's nest, snugly saddled on a branch of a maple or apple tree, ten feet or more above the ground, requires patience and keen eyesight. Unless you have seen one, you almost surely would mistake it for a bunch of lichens. It is a neat little structure of downy material covered with bits of lichens, fastened with spider and caterpillar webs.
May Seventeenth
It would interest you to visit a zoological park to study the growing antlers of a deer or an elk. A pair of black antlers, "in the velvet," as the hunters call it, have taken the place of the bony-colored ones shed in March. Just now they are somewhat flexible, and feverishly hot from the steady flow of blood that feeds them. If they are injured at this time, the owner might bleed to death.
May Eighteenth
"Caw, caw, caw, ka, ka, ka, ka-k-k-k-r-r-r-r." It sounds as though a crow were being strangled. Looking in that direction you see a large black bird fly from the woods to a meadow. After filling her beak with food she returns. No sooner is she within sight of the young crows, than they flap their wings, open their mouths and caw until the stifled, guttural sounds tell you that the morsel is being swallowed.