God’s littlest Cow

Giant Spiny Frog (Quasipaa spinosa), family Dicroglossidae, Guangdong, China

The males have keratinzed spines on the chest.

These moderately large frogs grow to a snout-vent length of up to 8.2 cm (3.2 in).

$777,000/2 br/2 ba

Jacksonville, OR

Built in 1981

[househunting on substack]

NB those pointing fingers, drawing attention to a pee-stain and an Irritated Clerk Comment about what happened one night in about 1420:

“Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem ubi cattie venire possunt.” "This is not an error, but the place where a cat peed from above one night. Confusion to that worst of cats who peed upon this book in the night at Deventer (city in the Netherlands) and because of him, all others likewise. And take care not to let books be open by night where cats are able to get at them."

If all the places we think of as "no longer wild" actually were, if the biodiversity we thought was gone actually was gone, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. The unintended and random plants, the wild weeds of lost and empty places, they hold us tightly, sustaining the few and meager scraps of symbiotic relationships that keep the Earth alive

The ditch beside the road is no longer a serene wetland. The wetland was bulldozed and destroyed and now it is a ditch, dirty and strewn with garbage. But because nobody looks closely, almost nobody sees...A few rushes and sedges have decided to grow here, there's a clump of stubborn and stunted cattails, and there in the weeds, a thickety willow cradling a blackbird's nest.

Easy to love the pristine wilderness in distant preserves, but will someone love this abused and ugly place? Will someone be moved to protect the wild of the roadside ditch and vacant lot as passionately as they protect the primeval forest?

Easy to see the importance of the Amazon rainforest for the very air in our lungs, but who will see the moss that grows between the bricks in the wall of their run-down apartment and realize, It is your oxygen that I breathe?

I read a paper one time suggesting that, even though the idea of monoculture is harmful through its influence on agricultural practice, monoculture does not actually exist, because in practice the weeds prevent it from becoming a reality.