After giving up the hunt for any more mushrooms, we walked down to the Pinehurst Branch. It took us a while of hanging out listening to the frogs along the creek before we found them, or should I say, before they came back out despite our presence. And then a while longer before we found this spot where several couples were mating and there were tubes and tubes of eggs. Which, come to think of it, means they were probably toads and not frogs (frogs lay their eggs in clumps). It looks like bufo americanus, in fact -- an American toad.
Animal Diversity Web has this amazing fact: "The females lay their eggs in the water, in long spiral tubes of jelly. They lay 4000 to 8000 eggs in two rows. When each row of eggs is stretched it generally measures between between six and twenty meters long (20 to 66 ft.)."
