My favorite science experience has always been working with wildlife. I enjoyed placing leg bands on longeared owls in the United States Great Basin. I also enjoyed tagging lava lizards on the Galapagos (ga lop uh gos) Islands. One day, I spent over 12 hours measuring and weighing hundreds of toadlets, or small toads. They had been laid as eggs in pools of water in a riparian (ri pair e an) forest after a spring flood. A riparian forest is a forest located next to a body of water. Later, the frogs underwent metamorphosis, developing from tadpoles to toadlets. They fell into traps that we used to count and release them. The toadlets were about the size of my thumbnail.