Yet soon as the stock pond holds water, great hoardes of the nocturnal toadlets appear. For a night or two, these mysterious creatures raise a ruckus, bleating at each other stridently as they hop about in a delirious mating ritual I have never witnessed. Since the toads are programmed to reproduce in shallow rain puddles which often last but a week or two, they waste little time in courtship subtleties. It rains, there's water--a mass orgy takes place. Fertilized eggs are cached in the water. And the adult toads vanish, presumably tunneling (backwards) into oblivion, there to await another propitious deluge one year hence.

Spadefoot eggs hatch immediately, and the results -- a Cecil B. DeMille production of tadpoles -- transforms itself from aquatic bumblers to air-breathing adults in a similarly vertiginous time period. The Guinness Book of World Records doesn't list the Fastest Spadefoot Conversion in history, but in his work The Desert Year, Joseph Wood Krutch tells of a tadpole that completed its metamorphosis from water creature to desert toad in eleven days.

Considering that most normal frog tadpoles need from three months to two years to evolve into land-based creatures, the spadefoot dispatch is nothing short of mercurial.

One day the pond is quiet; next day thousands of tadpoles are wiggling in the shallow water, feeding voraciously on algae, on mosquito larvae, and (of course) on each other. If I fell in, no doubt these miniature piranha fish would dismember me in seconds. Great bands of tadpoles bob and thrash against the surface, eating insects and gulping air. So many of them simultaneously nibble the atmosphere, that when I hold still I can hear their mouths making a sound like burbling foam on a big head of beer. Dipping cupped hands anywhere into the shallow pond, I can withdraw dozens of squirming polliwogs.

Soon I notice small "clams" zipping through the murky water. And here, I realize, is the answer to that accumulation of shells I discovered a few weeks ago in the bottom of a dry depression. I snatch a clam from the water and inspect the quivering organism inside, pink and fluttery, crowded with legs, feelers, other protuberances. I wonder aloud: "Is it a beetle, a bug, an arthropod--?" Back in Taos, curiosity sends me to the Harwood library, where a small guide book informs me that I'm dealing with a "clam shrimp." But I learn nothing about how such an animal could wind up in the stock pond.

SPADEFOOT TOADS AND CLAM SHRIMP are only beginning manifestations of the plateau's reproductive tenacity. Hera moths, more commonly called sheep moths, are another. Minutes after the rain they are abundant. Hundreds of them, using odd lackadaisical wingbeats, lazily skim over the sagebrush, waiting for wind to fling them to earth. Almost every day that I visit the stock pond I find dozens of moths quivering helplessly on the water: tattooed across their plump abdomens is the slogan BORN TO DROWN.

Vegetation flourishes; flowers blossom, die, create seeds; rabbits, mice, and prairie dogs eat like pigs, grow corpulent, and copulate with gusto. This in turn creates a rare food surplus on the mesa. Rattlesnakes, hawks, shrikes, and ravens grow plump on horned toads, pocket mice, and cottontails. Horned larks and sage thrashers gobble grasshoppers, moths, and wolf spiders. Wolf spiders grapple with crickets. Glistening orange wasps cruise through hot sunshine seeking little victims. Long- legged burrowing owls chase after collard lizards, the mesa's largest appendaged reptile. Fleeing on their hind legs, these lizards resemble comical little dinosaurs. Naturally, they reproduce quickly because they're dying in droves.

Nighthawks show up at dusk, smoothly cruising the stock pond, nabbing just-born insects. Small Mexican and large hoary bats also check in at twilight, having journeyed over from the rocky cliffs of the gorge a mile away. Red-tailed hawks, sharp-shinned birds, and little kestrels hunt the mesa more frequently Vultures circle on the fringe of things, over by Cerro or Tres Orejas, or high above the Rio Grande, hoping for a dead cow, a poisoned coyote, or drowned river rafter. Even meadowlarks stray from greener pastures and perch on cedar fenceposts, unleashing romantic lyrical melodies (of threat, defiance, and lust).

When I head home at night, dozens of black-eared jackrabbits and nervous cottontails race frenetically ahead of the truck, seemingly trapped by my headlights, a perfect illustration of the epithet: "dumb bunnies.' If it has rained, the lights are also apt to illuminate kangaroo rats zipping back and forth across the slick road in a nerve-rattling game of rodent roulette. When I brake, they halt; when I start up again they make mad dashes toward the crunching rubber of my Dodge Malthus-Wagon. I yelp, flinch, veer, and more than once have skidded into a ditch trying to avoid the suicidal beasties.

Text from the book "On The Mesa" by John Nichols, Copyright © John Nichols.
Reprinted with special permission from John Nichols - All Rights Reserved.
Photography © Peter Staats - All Rights Reserved.