Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
🐸 Houston toad
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
PS. In an effort to not hoard all of the good, I’m creating a directory of nature-related businesses, services, and nonprofits. It’s free to join, and you can plop your business details in here.
PPS. Come meet great people who go outside together: join ATX Outsiders.
Upcoming events I’m hosting:
Saturday, September 12: Bat-Watching and Bat Q&A: Featuring THE Skip Hobbie
Sunday, September 27: Reverse Brain Rot: read/write/Barton Springs
Monday, September 28: Austin Reading Club: solitary hobbies don’t have to be isolating
MERCH BRAINSTORM
We’re approaching one full year of Stumped by Nature fun facts, regionally-specific tangents, and extremely poor Wednesday night sleep hygiene.
Seems like a ripe opportunity for some newsletter swag.
A request: are there any phrases, creatures, images, or items that you associate with this slice of your inbox?
Left to my own devices, we’re working with quadruplet armadillos, The Gateway Drug to the Audubon Society, and Definitely-Not-a-Life-Crisis saguaro.
I’m willing to be influenced here.
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
I spent part of my week asking people what they know about toads.
One person asked me if I write for children, which is a fair question and a not currently.
One person lit up, and directed me toward a world that includes audio loggers, Dr. Forstner, and papers with titles like “Effect of head-starting of eggstrands of the endangered Houston toad (Bufo=[Anacyrus]houstonensis) from a captive assurance colony on native breeding pond microbiomes.”
Today we’re digging into the Houston Toad.
Ain’t he/she a beaut
We’re going to start with a little toad orientation and some ground rules:
Toads vs. Frogs
Both frogs and toads are tailless amphibians.They absorb oxygen and water directly through their permeable skin
Amphibians are cold-blooded, and named for their double-lives—part on land and part in water
All toads are taxonomically frogs, but:
Frogs have smooth, wet skin and long, leap-worthy legs, live in or near water, lay eggs in large gooey clumps, and use their speed to escape danger
Toads have dry, warty skin and short legs for crawling, live on land, can lay eggs in long parallel chains, and have toxin-secreting behind-the-eye glands
Toads have a fitness diet, like fit’n ess in their mouth—if they can put it in their mouth, they do. They’re right up there with bats in terms of their significant bug-eating
Things also like to eat them, including raccoons, snakes, owls, and larger frogs
Some humans have a diet of amphibians, which usually manifests as frog legs for their long springyness
Toad in the hole is, thank god, a misnomer. This has two breeds: a British concoction of sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter OR the American version, which involves a hole in toast with an egg tossed in
Toads in Popular Culture
Frog and Toad
This was by far the most common response when I asked folks what they knew about toads. This children’s book series from the 70’s features Frog and Toad, a stark absence of shirts, and lessons of patience, trust, and emotional resilience.
New to me: this literature is heralded as an example of a profound queer narrative, with quiet domesticity and deep emotional intimacy.
Kissing toad(s)
Ethically, I cannot recommend human/toad collaboration in a quest for a viable romantic partner.
Let the wild be the wild, as a general rule
Bestiality is a non-starter, despite Disney’s efforts to normalize it
Bufotoxins are toxic defense chemicals that toads secrete when they feel stressed or threatened, and it would absolutely ruin the mood
To be clear, this advice also applies as why not to lick toads, and the National Parks Service’s 2022 Don’t Lick the Toads PSA backs me up.
Just keep your mouthparts to yourself here.
Alright. We’re oriented. And now, we’re zooming in to our toad du jour: the Houston Toad
This tale starts in the pre-internet, pre-airbags, pre-Endangered Species list, post-daylight world of 1960s Houston, Texas.
John Wottring and his buddies drove around Houston at night just listening. One October ditch-lurking, truck bed session, the friends noticed a noise they knew they didn’t know, allowed curiosity to pull them more closely, and discovered a small, speckled-underbelly toad.
The original discovery location is now a sprawling housing development directly across I-10 from an astronomically-sized Outdoor World.
The name Houston toad stuck, even when its original home became an incompatible habitat.
It became among the first amphibians federally listed as endangered in 1970.
Fast Forward to 1992
Enter: Michael Forstner, who also did the deeply scientific work of sitting in his truck in the dark listening.
But his listening was in Bastrop, 30 miles east of Austin, and a place where finding a Houston toad seemed unlikely. So unlikely that, when he told his advisor he’d identified one, it took a week of expedited waiting for film to be developed at the drugstore photo department as proof. This was A Big Deal, to find something incredibly rare in an unexpected place.
Survival can be incredibly hard.
The transition from tadpole to toadlet is a shift from water to air-breathing.
Hopping toward savannah, loblolly pine woodlands is fraught with how delicious they are to other woodland creatures, and to the invasive, destructive force of fire ants along the way.
According to Forstner, egg-to-adult survivorship is roughly .001. If we were to apply this rate to retirement savings, a 401(k) with this return would have us ready to retire at age 6,890.
A heron would love this photo
Counting Toads
Forstner asked a reasonable question: how do you even count toads? By focusing on male toads calling for female mates, he and his grad students adopted a detection method that improved his crews’ rate of finding toads from 20% of survey nights to 80% of survey nights.
When there are under five callers (like, dudes singing together to lure in the ladies), it’s easy enough to distinguish individuals by ear. But identifying by ear gets dicey at the 5-10 male caller mark, and the 20+ hollering male cacophony gets a blanket Greater Than designation. Related: female Houston toads are known to only respond to calls when there are five or more males in chorus—there’s a universal need for social credibility.
But counting toads is more fun when more people are involved. The conservation efforts include educating and gamifying the chorus counting for citizens participating in the conservation program, betting how many toads they’re hearing, then verifying with after dark strolls around the pond.
As timelines progress, we’ve added technology—audio recorders capture a durable record over stretch of time, and now AI has helped notice a mathematical difference in how a Houston toad pops open its throat to make its call, distinguishing it from crickets that sound “irritatingly close” to a Houston toad call.
Another method of counting: microchips, like tagging your dog. This allows for repeated catch and release, and data to grow over time. This helped researchers note a population of at least a thousand Houston toad in the late aughts.
We like progress, not perfection
But then, disaster
The Bastrop County Complex Fire of 2011 directly impacted the primary Houston toad habitat. It swept over 95% of Bastrop State Park, was one of the most destructive wildfires in Texas history, and took the Houston toad population at the primary recovery site down to single digits. The species was functionally extinct if not for direct human intervention.
Another reasonable question: why would we want to save this toad from extinction?
The Houston toad is technically redundant in the bug-eating world and in the being-consumed-by-bigger-creatures world, so there’s no huge ecological gap left in its absence.
But this toad is an indicator species, which is a signal for the health of this specific Central Texas ecosystem. When that habitat disappears, the toad disappears with it. Caring about this specific species’ survival forces us to preserve and restore the larger habitat it (and many other species) need. This toad is just a symptom of a larger issue with the landscape, and once it’s gone, we’d need to tap into Jurassic Park-like biotech to bring it back.
Quick tangent: if you happen to need literary fiction that lassoes together snail conversation, the mail-order-bride economy, and the Ukraine War, Endling by Maria Reva exists.
The conservation work continues
All the eggs in one basket
In 2024, researchers detected over 700 Houston toads at the primary recovery site in Bastrop, thanks to decades of pond-lurking, headlamp forehead indentations, and mesh bags of toad eggs.
Lost Pines Habitat Conservation Plan is now a model for other programs to point to for their streamlined legal/permitting process and their method of making it easier for the community to play along.
Zoos are also key players with captive mating. Egg strands go into mesh bags to keep herons from slurping them like caviar.
The ongoing problem: isolated ponds leave males calling into the void. They need their wingmen in the chorus. So conservationists are concentrating eggs and connecting suitable habitats instead, betting that toads can power-in-numbers their way to Houston toad maturity.
In 2026, partners are releasing roughly 3 million eggs across three Bastrop sites..
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ September 11: Swift Night Out: Chimney Swift migration party, BYOTaylor
🗓️ September 11: FoundHer's Walk & Talk: women in motion
🗓️ September 12: Backyard Chickens 101: Hint: they go bock bock
🗓️ September 12: How To Make Your Backyard a Home for Bees: including bloom succession planning
🗓️ September 12: Bat-Watching and Bat Q&A: I’m co-hosting this. Bats!
🗓️ September 12: Blacksmithing Intro & History of Women in Blacksmithing: be ready for vast quantities of soot
🗓️ September 12: Tree ID Walk with TreeFolks: learn their names, tell them yours
🗓️ September 12: Foraging for Native Edibles: eat the wild
🗓️ September 12: Nature Makers: craft time
🗓️ September 12: Horses & Pilates: apple and human cores
🗓️ September 12: The Board Walks: always a good way to spend Saturday morning
🗓️ September 12: Boots and Bikinis: Two-stepping and swimming
🗓️ September 12-13: Pecan Street Festival: keeping the tradition thriving in Bee Cave
🗓️ September 13: Writers Walk: three miles with the creatives
🗓️ September 13: Fresh Goods and Goats: with an option to get bendy
🗓️ September 15: Grand Meadow Neighborhood Park Ribbon Cutting: SE Austin park glow up
🗓️ September 15: Hill Climbers Tuesday Ride: potential for after-ride tacos
🗓️ September 16: Gardening for Birds: this involves plants
🗓️ September 16: Music On The Trail: grab some live music
🗓️ September 17: Pumpkin Nights opens: this is a family favorite—highly recommend
🗓️ September 18: Trail Talks: always a great batch of people
PANTRY MOTH UPDATE
I wrote about my pantry moth infestation on June 25, 2026.
This mf’er
I’ll feel (relatively) comfortable building back up from pantry zero once I’ve not seen a moth for at least 45 days.
The days are long, the years are short
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you soak in some serious scientific research.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 Need to metabolize something? I help people write. Let’s chat.
🪵 Shall we take this outside? Of course.
🪵 Thinking out loud with people is a thing. See: a podcast, discussing philosophies around community building.
🪵 Are you sitting on a misogi-esque story? Spill.
🪵 Follow my calendar to know when we’re rallying.
🪵 I also write essays: this one is about witnessing a bison harvest.
🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.
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