The Wonder of Toads
I know you didn't think I meant it. You thought I'd done the frog thing and that would be it for the amphibians.
But no, here I am again with the toads.
Those tiny dots above are some rare Natterjack toad tadpoles to be found in pools among sand dunes at Roan Head (pronounced Ron Edd by the locals) near Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria: I took this photo in May last year.
If you click on this Natterjack toad link you'll find a photo by Joe Cornish, the National Trust photographer, which must surely have been taken very near to Roan Head: the environment looks identical. Here's my photo of Roan Head, which again I took in May last year:
It's a great place to walk on a beautiful beach with the Lake District mountains in the distance.
Most toads you come across will be Bufo Bufo, the common toad. They look similar to frogs, though rather wartier. It's easy to tell the difference between a frog and a toad: frogs hop, toads walk.
Frogs lay eggs in roundish blobs of spawn: toad spawn comes in long strings. Nobody has ever given me a satisfactory explanation as to why. What's so different between frog and toad anatomy? Toadlets always seemed to me a bit cleverer and less prone to drowning themselves than froglets: otherwise, if you want to rear toads from spawn, follow my frogspawn instructions earlier this month and you'll be fine.
Camping in France one year we found a lump under the sewn-in groundsheet of our tent which wouldn't go away, in spite of our best efforts to hammer it into the sand below the plastic. When we took the tent down after a fortnight the lump turned out to be a large toad which walked off in a dignified manner, apparently none the worse for being trodden on, slept on and whacked with hard objects. Hardy things, toads - and they can live for forty years.
COMING SOON - THE WONDER OF NEWTS
(and you know I mean it)
posted by Daphne at 6:36 pm
3 Comments:
Some where, in some arid dust bowl in the Antipodes, there be dried mud in the basin of a long evaporated lake. It remains hard baked clay with those ubiquitous cracks, for months, for years even.
Then one day, in some far away mountian range, it rains, and it keeps on raining, and the rivers rise and the water flows down into the arid dust bowla dnthe baked clay becomes a a lake once more.
And what do they get in the lake after a few days? Toads. Toads that have been lying dormant under the hard dry earth, like Chuck Norris - waiting.
Apparently they slow their hearts down to about one beat every century. Or so the cruel scientists say - the swines that turn up with spades and dig these poor creatures out of their comotose reverie.
So what you're saying is that a fortnight under our tent would be not even worth mentioning to your average toad endurance champion.
Not the Aussie ones no - it'd be a luxury!
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