1^9 '°^® '"^ *^® desert 



an unromantic looking creature if there ever was one — 

 will be demonstrating that she is really a hare, not a rabbit 

 at all, by giving birth to young furred babies almost ready 

 to go it alone instead of being naked, helpless creatures 

 like the infant cottontail. The latter will be born under- 

 ground, in a cozily lined nest; the more rugged jack rab- 

 bit on the almost bare surface. 



My special charge, the Sonoran spadefoot toad, will re- 

 main buried no one knows how many feet down for 

 months still to come. He will not celebrate his spring until 

 mid- July when a soaking rain penetrates deeply enough to 

 assure him that on the surface a few puddles will form. 

 Some of those puddles may just possibly last long enough 

 to give his tadpoles the nine or ten days of submersion 

 necessary, if they are to manage the metamorphosis which 

 will change them into toadlets capable of repeating that 

 conquest of the land which their ancestors accomplished 

 so many milhons of years ago. But while the buried spade- 

 foots dally, the buried seeds dropped last year by the little 

 six-week ephemerals of the desert will spring up and pro- 

 ceed v^th what looks like indecent haste to the business of 

 reproduction, as though — as for them is almost the case — 

 life were not long enough for anything except preparation 

 for the next generation. 



Human beings have been sometimes praised and some- 

 times scorned because they fall so readily into the habit 

 of pinning upon their posterity all hope for a good life, of 

 saying, "At least my children will have that better life 

 which I somehow never managed to achieve." Even plants 

 do that, as I know, because when I have raised some of 

 the desert annuals under the unsuitable conditions of a 

 winter living room, they have managed, stunted and sickly 



