Field Notes––

Toads Forever

By Dottie Evans

Jerk. Idiot. Spaz. Complete and utter toad.

A thousand years ago when I was a teenager, my best friend and I loved trading insults.

Being called a toad never failed to induce laughter. It meant that one of us had said or done something truly outrageous and unacceptable to the other. Somehow, there was also mutual recognition that the offense was totally in character.

I was toadlike when I refused to accompany her to a Saturday morning ear-piercing clinic at the mall, and I was toadlike when I ordered feta cheese pizza with spinach –– my favorite –– even though she was over for supper and I knew she liked sausage, onions, and peppers.

She was a toad when she went steady at age 15 –– way too young I decided, though I liked the guy and she did eventually marry him. Forty years later, they are still together enjoying their grandchildren.

Looks aside, a toad isn’t a bad thing to be. A toad has a mind of its own, and it seems generally to enjoy life.

For starters, toads can live a long time — up to 30 years. They go about their business quietly, not making any noise except on spring nights when their dreamlike warbling song fills up the darkness. If you hear what sounds like a cricket in the springtime, it is probably a toad. Along with the peepers, the mating song of Bufo Americanus is the standout soprano aria lasting 30 seconds or so, leading the amphibian chorus that reaches its crescendo on rainy April nights.

Toads keep to themselves. They hide out during the day and their nights are spent searching for dinner that can be a variety of invertebrates, especially worms and ants, beetles, slugs, spiders, and mites.

Gardeners and toads have a special understanding. It’s a rare summer when I don’t encounter a toad in my perennials, usually while I’m weeding and I inadvertently blow his cover. I can guess where he’s hiding by the spaniel’s intent downward gaze and wagging tail.

Toads are quite beautiful in their own way and handling a toad really will not cause warts. A toad may, however, release a copious amount of liquid that is toxic to some extent if it is snatched from its lair or mouthed by curious dogs.

This defense mechanism might be why William Shakespeare called toads “ugly and venomous” in As You Like It. The bard also described Richard III as a “poisonous, bunch-back’d toad!” and a toad was one of the first ingredients he chose to spice up the witches’ brew in Macbeth.

Englishmen later learned to love their toads. Who could forget Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows (1908) chronicling the irrepressible, childlike antics of Toad and his friends Ratty, Mole, and Badger. Frontier Americans looked for the first “hop toad” of spring to hop in their direction and bring them good luck. And who’s to say that Mark Twain’s famous Jumping Frog of Cavaleras County wasn’t a toad.

In China, they see the Toad — not the Man — in the Moon. Eclipses happen when that toad tries to swallow itself.

What I like best about a toad is you can count on him. He lives in my garden from April to November and then he just disappears. While I am struggling through snow and ice all winter, my toad has burrowed three feet down and is hibernating well below the frostline. Come spring, he’ll reemerge and head straight for the nearest freshwater pond where he will find a mate and lay six or seven thousand eggs in a long gelatinous string.

When the eggs become pollywogs and the pollywogs grow legs, the young toads –– tiny replicas of the adults –– hop en masse out of the water into the meadow or across the forest floor. If you see one tiny toad, look around because there may be hundreds more. It’s an amphibious invasion.

Having descended from amphibian ancestors that first crawled out of the Devonian seas some 360 million years ago, toads are survivors. They have character.

Call me a toad any time because I know there’s affection mixed up in it.