I spent the day at the lake and found a tadpole nursery - look how many! Click on the picture to see the video.
Nice big pollywogs!
Impressive!
I once found a “tadpole nursery” in the water caught in a hollow on top of a boulder. The water was warm and the perfect place to hatch a huge number of very tiny tadpoles.
I collected some and raised them in an aquarium to see what they’d become – very tiny “spring peeper”-type frogs, it turned out. They were so small I had to cut the heads off mealworms to feed them.
I went back and released the adults in the same area I’d gathered the tadpoles.
Are those bullfrog tadpoles, by any chance? I’ve seen very similar ones here in a local pond and those were from bullfrogs.
I’m not exactly sure which kind they are except I’m confident they are not bullfrogs as they’re quite a bit smaller than bullfrog tadpoles. If I had to guess I’d say they are tree frog tadpoles.
When I was a little kid, I and the other kids I went to school with used to find and catch tadpoles in a jar all the time. It seemed like tadpoles could be found everywhere even a tiny body of water was.
Nowadays I don’t seem to notice tadpoles anymore. Not sure if that’s because they’re less numerous than they used to be, or I just don’t have that curious investigatory sense of wonder that I had as a kid.
I once noticed a mud puddle by the side of the road that had persisted a few days after a heavy rain, which was full of tadpoles. I thought sadly, those poor tadpoles are happily swimming around living their little tadpole lives with no idea that the mud puddle is probably going to dry up before they become mature enough to grow legs and hop to a better body of water.
Since then, “tadpoles in a mud puddle” is an occasional metaphor I use for the human race.
You’d be surprised how long those puddles can last, or how fast those tadpoles can mature. I recall seeing tadpoles in puddles as a kid, too. With frogs, though, there are huge numbers of tadpoles so that at least a proportion of them can survive to become frogs. You might want to mix that into your “human race” metaphor.
Well, the human race has proven to be pretty resilient as well.
…so far 
Amphibian populations worldwide have been declining since the 1980s. 
Are you in western North America? Because my first guess was Western Toad. They tend to be blocky, black and aggregate in large numbers. But hard to get a definitive ID without having them in hand.
Yes! I am in the Pacific Northwest on Vancouver Island. They were blocky and black so I bet you’re right!
Very cool!
They look like Western spadefoot toad, I’ll tell the large number of them tends to confirm that
I don’t think they venture this far north.