Toad Chorus announces spring

I finally heard the songs of the toads in the seasonal pond east of Weston Cemetery. Unfortunately, when the toads try to get to the pond, they must cross a road, and a lot of them do not make it. On Sunday morning I saw six of them that had been killed by cars.
There were four near the main entrance to Weston Cemetery. They had been run over repeatedly and were very flat.
If the tadpoles make it to tiny toad status, many will have to cross the roads in the other way and there will be a repeat of the carnage.

My rant for Earth Week: The people who oppose wind farms often talk about the number of birds that will be killed by the rotating blades. The mere thought that anything could be killed by these blades strikes some people as reason to oppose wind farms. I wonder if these people ever get out of their cars and look at what is on and along the roads of American. There are dozens of birds, mammals, amphibians, or reptiles killed on every mile of even moderately busy roads. (And if we were worried about non vertebrates, it would be tens of thousands per mile. Check out any country road after a heavy rain for dead earthworms.)

A few years ago I thought it would be interesting to offer an offset to the wind-farm bird kills. Just as Al Gore says it is OK for him to use as much energy as a dozen normal people use because he offsets his carbon footprint, it would be OK for the wind farms to kill birds if for every bird they killed they saved a bird somewhere else. I could provide that service for a fee. I would go to the animal shelters, adopt cats, and kill them. Fewer cats, more birds.

It is good to rant every so often. I find it hard to take seriously the Al-Gore type of environmentalists, who talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. (By the way, electricity is fungible. That means paying for "green" electricity from the grid is nonsense.)

(Also posted at rensselaeradventures.blogpsot.com)