Another one

Remember how we were digging out our bushes in the raised bed in our back yard a few weeks ago and found a Colorado River Toad? Well, my goal for January (and probably February and March, judging by how much progress I'm [not] making) is to get the whole raised bed prepped for gardening. That mostly involves sifting a lot of dirt to get all the rocks out (and there are A LOT of rocks). After a good portion of the rocks are gone, I'll add some stinky stuff to make it good soil.

Since I haven't really done much on it, I decided today to go out and work on my goal. Not too long into it I unearthed this:

See in the far right of the area where I'm digging? Here's a closer look:

Yeah. It's another Colorado River Toad. This guy was in total hibernation mode. Even when I scooped him up to put him in a box to take down the street to the desert he kept sleeping. So of course after that I start thinking, "Next time I'm going to split one in half." As I go to resume my digging I notice what is at the far left of the picture above-the little white spot. Here's a zoomed (staged afterwards) picture:

See there in the middle. I totally thought it was another toad's foot that I'd either skinned the bottom of, or just barely missed chopping off the thing's leg with the shovel. It was shaped just like the other guy's front foot. After some careful excavating (I recruited Jacob to help because I didn't want to be the one to spill the toad's guts all over the place), we discovered it was a root of the bush we had uprooted a month or two ago. But that did nothing to aleviate my fear of chopping one in half. I quit for day soon thereafter. We'll see how tomorrow goes...