The Hidden Life of a Toad [Hardcover]

In jaw-dropping photos, Doug Wechsler captures the life cycle of the American toad from egg to tadpole to adult. To get these images, Wechsler sat in a pond wearing waders, went out night after night in search of toads, and cut his own glass to make a home aquarium. The resulting photos reveal metamorphosis in extreme close-up as readers have never seen it before.

Budding naturalists will be transfixed by this unprecedented peek into the secrets of tadpole transformation. 


A book that encourages observation and conservation and may start some young biologists off on their own lifelong quests to understand animals — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A fascinating look at toad development — Booklist, starred review

Suitable for libraries needing to bolster their early nonfiction collections — School Library Journal

A remarkable visual chronicle of an easily overlooked creature — Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Chicago Public Library’s 2017 Best of the Best Books selection

2018 Green Earth Book Honor for Children’s nonfiction
What is this tangle of stuff? It looks like a pile of spaghetti, says the text about the photograph of black-spotted, jelly-like squiggles creeping over the gutter from the recto spread that is surely enigmatic and even a bit creepy. A page turn reveals that the spots are embryos, thousands of them encased in each jelly strong, and a single little egg would just fit inside this o. The book updates every few days the progress of the eggs as they hatch into tadpoles, bringing readers along with large close-up photos, enhanced by insects and labels, that make it easy to view each new anatomical bit discussed in the text. In his closing notes Wechsler addresses how he captured his photographs both in the wild and in an aquarium and also his surprise at unexpected observations. This personal sense of wonder and discovery transll³.