Rain continues with three inches in two days, and the creek roars with water drained from asphalt and concrete, channeled into gutters and storm sewers. Three-fourths of my neighborhood is impervious, although in the ravine, buffered by a tree canopy and leaf litter, rain soaks into soil, is retained by the spongy organic layer, and drips slowly through limestone cracks, surfacing in seeps and springs. Those drips used to deposit travertine that held water in shallow pools, but now the water simply races, washing out everything in its path. For stream-breeding insects, crayfish, and amphibians, flooding is disastrous. Eggs, nymphs, and tadpoles are smashed if not washed out -- a waste of breeding effort. Amphibian reproduction is generally unsuccessful except in summer, when only Gulf Coast toads lay eggs. Woodhouse toads, Strecker's chorus frogs, southern and Rio Grande leopard frogs, and smallmouth salamanders have been eliminated from the creek and its ponds or severely reduced in numbers, but a few long-lived adults keep trying. Even a creekbottom stocktank, a breeding pond in ranching days, has been destroyed by the floods. They can come at any time, but the really big floods like today's, when inches-deep water rises several feet, are usually in our spring and fall rainy seasons. The sound from my front porch, 150 feet away, is like river rapids. Since I live about 200 yards from Owl Hollow's head, now buried by construction of a through street, I hear only the beginning of "gully washers" and "toad stranglers," as ranchers call them with good meaning. I can imagine what it sounds like downstream, as tributaries swell the main creek's flow and contribute to erosional destruction.