Another reason I’ve had vultures on the brain is because I owe a friend a vulture.  Specifically, a king vulture, Sarcoramphus papa, the largest of the Cathartids, the New World Vultures.  They are the largest vulture in our hemisphere if you don’t count the two condors, and they are striking birds (literally — I was given a hammery-beaky once-over by one in captivity long ago, but that’s a different post), with black-and-white plumage and a bare-skinned, froot-loops colored head roped with chicken-skin folds.  If that weren’t enough, both genders sport a caruncle on the top of their bills: a warty, fleshy, bright orangey-yellow knob whose purpose, frankly, I don’t know, if not to gild the lily.

So, here is Jack’s King vulture, in progress, Increment 1.  Having modeled the bird, it awaits slip, with a photo behind for plumage color reference.  I’ll give it a base coat of slip (“paint” made of clay, mineral colorants, and water) in appropriate colors while the stoneware is still damp.  Once it is completely dry, it will go into its first (or bisque) firing.  After that it’ll get glazes and other finishing colorants applied, and be fired again.

As usual with clay, the heaviness of the material requires support, so I’ve had to fudge some physical realities: I can’t make the legs as thin as they are in nature, and I’ve used the wings as the third point of support so the bird stands by itself.  Normally, a vulture’s wings, as ample as they are, don’t reach the ground in a standing bird. But other typical characteristics will carry the likeness through: the hunched posture, the partially opened wings, the body plumage color, and of course, pleated froot-loop head.

Increment 2: Slip treatment.  In this case, the slips were applied with a brush.  They will not acheive their finished colors until the final Cone 5 firing.  For now, the black looks brown and the white looks grayish.  The froot loop colors will be applied as glazes, after bisquing.  Now this guy will sit until he’s TOTALLY dry.  Also, his body is hollow, and this time I did remember to pierce an inconspicuous hole to the cavity.  Stay tuned for later posts for finishing touches.

Most of us think of vultures as being all-dark birds, like Turkey vultures.  But there are predominantly white vultures, like the King.  In the Old World, the Egyptian vulture, also a vulture primarily of hot climates, is mostly white-plumaged.  You would think a large white bird would be disadvantaged by being easily seen.  Actually, King vultures, when roosting and nesting in their tropical forest habitat, are surprisingly difficult to see.  Their white feathers reflect the green light passing through the foliage around them, making them blend in quite well.  They are somewhat shy despite their regal reputation, and tend to assume a self-effacing posture when perched on a limb.  A King vulture in Belize “hid” from us this way.  We spotted it on the ground in a field.  Feeling our “eyeball pressure” it felt safer flying up into a tree, where it hid its head behind a tiny clump of foliage.  The rest of its enormous body remained in plain sight, but it felt better, and would peek out from the leaves occasionally to see if we were gone yet.

In the air, an all-white bird glints in the sun, but of course, up there, they’re out of reach, especially at the altitudes King vultures acheive.  It’s a spectacular sight to see the bright wedge of a King, as white and as large as a pelican, rising on thermals over a mahogany forest.  The photo below is of just such a Belizean forest as a King vulture would favor.  Imagine one soaring just out of frame, with Bat falcons, Swallow-tailed kites, White hawks and other tropical birds of prey swirling on the updrafts from the Escarpment near Chan Chich, one of the few places in that flat country where you can get out and up over the forest.

An excellent feature of Turkey vultures is see-through nostrils.  That is, they lack a septum, so the opening to their sinuses goes straight through the top of their beak. This is handy for an organism which eats its meals with its head in the liquescent innards of dead things. With just a quick sneeze, any annoying clogging matter can be ejected. Also, the free passage of air into the sinuses enables the scent of lunch to be picked up even from an altitude of several hundred feet.

The pervious nostril can be easily seen in the photo above (by E. Shock).  If this vulture were chilly it would keep warm by pulling his feathery neck-ruff up to his ears by corrugating his forehead skin even more.

The “pervious nostril” is a characteristic of the New World Vultures (the Cathartids: Turkey, Black, and King vultures, the Lesser and Greater Yellow-headed vultures, and both California and Andean condors) and like their bare facial skin is a physical characteristic most likely related to their ancestry: genetic studies have shown they are possibly more closely related to storks than to the Old World vultures and other birds of prey.

It goes without saying that the pervious nostril, as being indispensable to the visual character of the organism, is always faithfully reproduced in Three Star Owl vulture items such as candle-holders (seen to the right, as well as in the Three Star Owl Shop) and a small vulture bottle.

Etymology: If you grew up calling Turkey vultures “buzzards” as many Americans do, you are using a word translplanted here by European English-speaking settlers.  There are no vultures in the British Isles, but there are hawks, which are called “buzzards”.  When newly arrived Europeans saw our big vultures circling overhead, they used the word they had always used for raptors.  The “Turkey” part of the common name “turkey vulture” comes from the fact that at a distance turkey vultures, which like wild turkeys spend a lot of time on the ground, look like turkeys, being of a similar size, with dark body plumage and having colorful bare heads.

Here’s St. George killing a dragon (which in this case is admittedly a very mammalian-looking scourge).  Note the size of the creature.  Most St.George dragon-slayer paintings show a dragon smaller than a horse, in the vicinity of a cave and peaks in the wilderness, not a giant dinosaurian Smaug-type scale-meister.

This observation is added to the arguments of the last post as meta-evidence of the vulture as dragon-source.  Also, it’s an excuse to post this fine painting by Raphael which has been a favorite of mine since childhood.

The allegory of St. George and the dragon is a Christian re-telling of the Perseus legend, which is no doubt a re-telling of an even older tale, wherein a young hero saves the people of the country-side as well as a king’s daughter from an evil plague in the form of a dragon.  For an odd version of this tale, identical in its iconography to the Raphael but almost Dali-esque in lay-out, check out Paolo Uccello’s St. George (ca. 1470):

The lady does not seem to need rescuing; she appears to be walking the two-legged monster on a leash.  I would put this very Jabberwocky-like anatomical configuration — two taloned legs and two wings — forward as a bird-like model for a dragon.  But using art as evidence can lead to problems: look at the colorful round patterns on the bat-like wings.  I do not propose that dragons and butterflies are generally considered related.  And what’s with the squares of turf, and bubbly spiral rising from the trees?  I’d say Uccello needed to get out more, except that there was obviously a lot of interesting stuff going on in his head…  By the way, “Uccello”, a nickname, came from the painter’s fondness of painting birds, and means “bird” in Italian (and, like “cock” has another meaning, according to online sources).

Click on either painting for a larger image.

The Uccello painting, which is in London’s National Gallery, inspired the U.A. Fanthorpe poem “Not my best side”.  It has nothing at all to do with vultures, but it made me laugh that such an iconic religious allegorical painting gave rise to such secular speculation — a perfect illustration of how art inspires without regard for artists’ intentions:

I

Not my best side, I’m afraid.
The artist didn’t give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn’t comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don’t mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.

II

It’s hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It’s nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn’t much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon–
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl’s got to think of her future.

III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can’t
Do better than me at the moment.
I’m qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don’t you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don’t
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don’t you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You’re in my way.

–U.A. Fanthorpe

A vulture blew up in a bisque kiln yesterday.  Dang!  And it was my own fault, too, a foolish, neophyte error: its body was hollow, and I forgot to make a hole in it for the hot air inside to escape, kerPOW.  The carnage is visible, right.  Fortunately, nothing else in the kiln was harmed.

Vultures have been on my mind recently.  Not only because I’ve been making turkey vulture items like the candle-holder that blew up, and the small “bottle” with the movable head in a recent post, but because of a show I watched recently on PBS.

It wasn’t about vultures.  It was called the Dragon Chronicles, and it was an episode of Nature with a genial herpetologist traveling around the other hemisphere finding examples of real reptilian organisms which shared some of the characteristics of dragons, to promote how each could have given rise to the existence of the legendary fire-breather.  It was a pleasant way of spending a TV hour, but the basic premise seemed a bit of a stretch because the narrator put forth several separate organisms rather than one as possible sources of the dragon legend.

I’ve got a different theory.  I think tales of dragons arose from encounters with vultures.  Think about these “known” characteristics of Dragons:  they are reptilian and large, with snaky necks, they fly, live in caves, horde treasures, are long-lived, wise, fire-breathing, and man-eating.  You can make a good case for each of these also being true of vultures:

Eurasian black vulture. Photographed by Julius Rückert.

Vultures are very large; in the Old World, the Eurasian black vulture of mountainous regions between the Iberian peninsula and Korea is one of the largest birds of prey in the world, massive by both bulk and wingspan (weighing in at nearly 30 lbs and keeping this heft in the air with a nearly 10 foot wingspan).  Its nearest competitors, the Lappet-faced vulture and Andean Condor, are also airborn giants.  With their bare neck and head, vultures are quite reptilian but, unlike modern reptiles, they can fly.  Their contour plumage is stiff and when a vulture rouses (shakes) to adjust disarrayed feathers it rattles like a scale-covered creature, often emitting scraps of fluff and powdery cuticle flakes from feather sheaths.  They lay eggs which are much larger than most birds’, and if broken, would have a baby vulture embryo inside, looking very dragon-like.  Many species of vulture roost and nest in caves and ledges, often in inaccessible peaks and cliffs, where their (to our noses) malodorous lairs are filled with a loose pile of sticks, droppings, and debris — maybe not golden treasure, but a heap of stuff for sure.  In the case of the European vulture-like raptor the marrow-eating Lammergeier (photo below), there are often bones on the ledge, enhancing its image as horder.  When approached too closely, a vulture will hiss loudly, and when pressed further, will sometimes disgorge the contents of its stomach in a forceful jet — like breathing fire.  This disagreeable material (remember they are carrion eaters) is acid enough to be corrosive. A fine deterrent to an interloper, this is also a way of lightening the load for flight.  Most vultures are long-lived, and there are records of Turkey Vultures living past 60 years in captivity.  They are “smart” in the way people mean it, because to some degree all vultures are social, interacting in large numbers at carrion and in migration.  As for man-eating?  Well, long bones in the lair could be interpreted as human by someone who only got a quick glimpse before being driven away by an enraged incubating vulture’s hot projectile carrion slush.  Grimmer still, in times when battlefields and other human casualties were not always swiftly cleaned up, vultures would have made meals of human dead.  As nature’s “Nettoyeurs” (remember Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita?) it isn’t uncommon even today for vultures to be blamed for deaths of livestock they didn’t cause, but were taking advantage of.

Lammergeier, photo by Richard Bartz.

I should add that there are also dragon-type creatures in the mythology of the New World, like the cliff-dwelling, human-devouring Piasa Bird of the Mississippi valley, and of course, Black Vultures and Turkey vultures live in the U.S., not to mention California Condors which had a range of nearly the entire U.S. in the times legend would have been made.  And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of New World vulture mythology; the King Vulture of Central and South America has a prominent place in the mythology of the Maya.

There’s no way to know for certain that vultures were the source of the dragon myth, but I find vultures to be the closest thing to dragons that I’ve personally experienced.

Right now most Vultures that breed in the U.S. are on their wintering grounds, in the far southern states and points farther south.  Even in toasty Phoenix, we won’t see them again regularly until spring, where as in so many places like Hinckley Ohio their return is celebrated on a specific date.  Here in central Arizona, it will be around the third week of March.  So after that, look up in the sky and see if you can Spot the Dragon.

To the right are Turkey Vulture Candle-holders from Three Star Owl (inquire for pricing).

Bonus fact about turkey vultures:  they have an excellent sense of smell, and I’ve heard that some Gas companies use a rotty-smelling compound called ethyl-mercaptan in their gas, to check for open-country gas leaks by looking for kettles of (frustrated!) vultures circling over broken pipeline.

Bonus bonus trivia about Lammergeier, from Wikipedia:

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was said to have been killed in 456 or 455 BC by a tortoise dropped by an eagle who mistook his bald head for a stone – if this incident did occur, the Lammergeier must be a likely candidate for the “eagle”.

The black and white photo of the very vulturine Dragon Bridge is by Barbara Meadows.

Fortunately, I was able to hook up with V on her scouting trip this morning, and this is where we went: the dawn lift-off of Sandhill cranes just south of the town of Willcox, AZ.

Above is a photo of a small fraction of the cranes flying out from the ice-crusted ponds where they spent the night — something like 6 or 8 thousand roost at this place.  Dos Cabezas peak in the Chiricahuas is the twinned topography in the distance.  The sound the cranes make is as much a part of the spectacle as the sight of thousands of birds in wheeling lines overhead.  It’s an amazing noise, which I haven’t found an adequate way of describing.  A croaky sort of rattly trumpeting, continuous and amplified and multiplied by thousands of syrinxes, it’s mixed with the baby-piping calls of immature birds urging their parents to wait up, distinct above the stuttery honks of the adults.  (I’ve got a great video clip with the sound of the lift-off that I’m currently unable to get the editor to accept; I’ll post as soon as that struggle is over…)

An immature Golden eagle momentarily fools us all into thinking it’s intent on a crane on the fly, but it turns out to be adolescent high jinx and it perches on a power tower instead, after creating a fuss in the air, and setting most of the remaining cranes into flight.  Earlier, a handful of Chihuahan ravens hadn’t done as efficient a job of agitating everyone.

The cranes fly out to feed in the stubbly fields of Sulphur Springs Valley during the day: here’s a telephoto shot of a group working in a field with an irrigation pivot looking like a fence behind them.  They move slowly but steadily as a group, pecking the ground and occasionally each other, challenging breast to breast and vocalizing if necessary.  An occasional stick is brandished boldly, and there is some hopping about, with stick.  The immatures have brownish crowns, the adults a bright red heart-shaped “shield” between the base of their bill and their crowns.  Not visible in the picture, a big Ferruginous hawk lurks over the crowd, perhaps waiting for the probing bills to stir up a rodent, and American kestrels follow the foraging flocks as well. The cranes themselves often seem to follow the field equiptment, poking through freshly turned soil for goodies.  Horned larks work the furrows too, a Loggerhead shrike emits a variety of calls from a power line, and Eastern meadowlarks in large numbers stalk purposefully over the clods.  All of these birds, like the farmers, make their living off the soil of the Sulphur Springs Valley, and to some degree their numbers and even presence are due to agriculture.

In Willcox,  Land of the Cranes, they are everywhere: back at the motel, a solitary crane poses obligingly on the commode, but its stately blue silence has little in common with the mobile, gabbling gray thousands we’ve just witnessed.

For those of you within range of southeastern Arizona, consider visiting the annual Wings Over Willcox Nature Festival this weekend.  Held in the historic community of Willcox, this event celebrates the yearly return of tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes to the Sulphur Springs Valley in southeastern Arizona.  The rich Chihuahuan desertscrub and grasslands are slung between the Chiricahua Mountains and the Dragoon Mountains.  Patched with mesquite bosques, farmland, rangeland, and dotted with pools and ponds of semi-permanent and seasonal water, the Sulphur Springs Valley is winter home not only to the cranes, but to extraordinary numbers of birds of prey, sparrows and longspurs, waterfowl, shore birds including upland varieties, and other bird species people may not commonly associate with our region.  Scaled quail, Eastern meadowlarks, Bendire’s thrashers and Mountain plovers lurk in the wintery fields along with more expected Roadrunners and Gambel’s quail.  It’s a land of agricultural heritage — hydroponics and hay, and ranching, too.

This close to the event, many of the fieldtrips are filled, but check at the registration desk in the Community Center for last minute cancellations.  Also, many of the sights, notably the crane lift-off at Whitewater Draw and elsewhere along the farm roads in the Valley, are something you can do on your own.  The WOW organizers can give advice on where and when to go.

This year’s festival is the sixteenth annual WOW, and it’s the second year Three Star Owl has been in Willcox for the event, offering Arizona-specific table wares and sculptural items both funky and sensible.

Come visit “The Owl” at:

Booth 12, Willcox Community Center, 312 West Stewart Street, Willcox, AZ

Friday 16 Jan: 10am -7pm

Saturday 17 Jan: 8am – 5pm

Sunday 18 Jan: 8am – 3.30pm

more info at: wingsoverwillcox.com

Right: Small Turkey Vulture “Bottle” with detachable, posable head.

(3.75″ ht, $52)

Bird photograpy by Ed Bustya, “Sandhill Cranes taking flight”.

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)

This weekend is Audubon Arizona’s fundraiser, Gifts from Nature, and Three Star Owl will be there with a selection of new and classic items for you to check out.  Come by and say Hi!  The details are on the flyer below!  Hope to see you there…

There have been many delays and distractions for the Stacked Toad Effigy Teapot: computer failure and restoration, other deadlines, and Thanksgiving, including a tragic Saguaro Plunge, details to be posted later.

But here is the next phase: the “lid” of the “teapot” is in place, and also the “finial” (knob), with Hector Halfsquid for scale.

This involved the addition of more toads — the final toads — to represent the top of the “teapot”.  The visual theme is toads-upon-toads, stacks of toads, piles of toads.  During the Couch’s spadefootlet episode, I was reminded of the toadly practice of Climbing On Your Neighbors.  When kept in captivity in large numbers, toads (and other amphibians and reptiles) will climb on each other with no regard for personal space, or any politeness at all.  I wanted to capture this “toe-in-the-eye” sense of physical involvement in the Toad Stack.  So on went two more toads, atop the base grouping of four toads.  Despite more than a week having elapsed this was not a problem, because even in the desert clay can be kept workable if enough dry-cleaners’ plastic and moist towels are employed. On the right is a shot of damp paper towels swathing the heads of the toads; they will need to be textured at some point, and if they’re too hard, it won’t work and the moist towels keeps the clay pliable and soft enough to receive an impression.

The effect of the two new toads, striving against each other on top of the pile, was what I wanted, but they needed a focal point — a flying insect they’re both trying to swallow.  This was the finial, or knob, of the “teapot” “lid”:

At this point, I always feel a piece is almost finished: the basic elements are sculpted and in place, there are at the moment no structural crises to solve.  But it’s far from the truth: a lot still remains to be done — texturing, refining shape detail (toes!), cleaning up stray clay bits and meaningless marks, applying decorative slip, etc.  For instance, I’ve forgotten until now about parotoid glands, which will have to be added.  And, other time-consuming details like compound eyes on the flying prey item.  So stay tuned for the next post on the effigy teapot: Texturing the Toad.

(Potential Toe Count: 104; Actual Toe Count: 49 so far; current Biological Digit Deficit, 53%)

Increments so far:

Why is a toad not a frog?

You almost certainly know this, but a toad isn’t a frog.

If that came as a surprise, it’s time for a speedy round-up of amphibian facts:

In general: toads have dry warty skin, frogs have moist slick skin. Toads need little or no water except to breed; frogs are usually amphibious. Toads have large kidney-shaped swellings behind each eye called parotoid glands; frogs have round hearing-related structures called tympani behind each eye. Most people think toads are gross but frogs are cute. That isn’t science; it’s just bad taste. Frogs croak, but many toads like  Woodhouse’s toads have beautiful muscial trills. ( If you were a Woodhouse’s toad, you’d think that was beautiful…) Toads have stout compact bodies with short legs for hopping; frogs are often svelte and long-legged for leaping.  Most frogs have webbed feet, most toads are not or only partially web-footed.  Frogs are more inclined to climb; toads are more inclined to dig.  Both can secrete irritating or even poisonous compounds that deter predators.

To the right above is a photo of a Ramsey Canyon Leopard Frog being aquatic.  Contrast it with the photo below it, a tropical toad from Belize. (photos, A. Shock)

In fact, these distinctions are generalizations and don’t hold true for every frog or toad. For more detail, I recommend the Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness book Amphibian, by Dr. Barry Clarke.  It’s meant for kids, but it’s really all anyone but a real herpetologist needs to get the gist of of toads, frogs, and caecilians.