(For the conservation team of toad-raisers at the San Francisco Zoo)

With faces that perhaps only other toads
could love, 118 Yosemite toads recently
hopped into a remote meadow where

their ancestors once thrived—each settler
outfitted with a nifty amphibian antenna
snugly attached. Their predecessors perished

in the 2013 Rim Fire that swept through
many of these mountain meadows, but these
descendants have been brought home.

The curmudgeonly looking creatures with
their lazy eyelids look so mellow for rock stars
not seen in a decade in these parts,

the only toads in the Sierra living at
11,000 feet—and no other place on Earth.
What a comeback—their numbers reduced

by half more than a decade ago—
the brown-and-black speckled hoppers
making their way around ancestral land,

sending information back to the humans
who saved them at toady mission control,
eager for every transmission from

this new generation of tailless explorers,
transported 180 miles east by helicopter,
landing in a particular kind of outer space.