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This is Ethel. She lives in a little pond outside our kitchen. She's a green frog. She's about 2 to 2.5 inches (5 - 6.5 cm) long, about double that with her legs outstretched. According to every metric I can find, she's a little girl. Her color is dark, her tympanium is the same size as her eye, she doesn't have knobs on her "hands", she has a white belly, and she likes Abba tunes. (I made that last part up, but she does hum along when I'm listening to Fernando or Dancing Queen on Pandora.) Frogs are fascinating little creatures. They have a lung, but they don't have a diaphram. They breath by moving the membrane below their jaw. They can get oxygen through their skin though, but only when they're wet, so if they're in oxygenated water, they don't need to breathe. They're cold blooded, and green frogs can survive being frozen in the winter, as long as they're not frozen too hard. -20 deg F (-29 deg C) is about their limit. They shelter in protected places in order to avoid the worst of it.
Here's a view of the massive scale of one of these old railroad trestles across the Rock River in Janesville, Wisconsin (USA).
This is the site of the former Monterey Dam in Janesville, Wisconsin (USA). The dam has already been removed. The power shovel is picking up the fill in the river, and depositing it behind itself. The front end loader then picks up the dirt from that pile and spreads it across the site of what will now be the riverbank. The railroad bridge in the background is just a skeleton. It contains no tracks, no floor of any kind. Just the steel framework, rusting away. The sky is colored gray by the smoke from 1000 miles to the west, where it seems that wildfires are burning the entire country.
