Seething with toads

[vaneramos]

The American toad, Bufo americanus, is one of the most familiar amphibians throughout eastern North America. It's the only toad species found in most of eastern Canada. When I was growing up, we always had a fat resident toad under our back porch light, where insects frequented. Sometimes we would find one of them in the process of being swallowed by a fox snake. We liked the big snakes, too, but Mother (never completely at peace with certain realities of life) would try to rescue these toads. They were inevitably stunned, helpless, and resigned to their fates. If we allowed them to meet their demise, they would invariably be replaced by young up-and-comers.

Adults and tadpoles secrete a mild poison rendering them unpalatable to most predators. Apparently snakes don't care.

I never encountered the breeding behaviour of toads until I moved here. One balmy May evening I strolled to the park. In the darkness there I encountered a disturbing phenomenon. The dry leaves in the woods were rustling with hopping bodies of thousands of toads. They converged on the Eramosa River, where an eerie orchestra of high-pitched trills arose. It was deafening. Approaching the riverbank, I found the water seething with mating bodies. They had emerged from the city to turn the shallows dark with cold, amphibious lust and lay their eggs.

Within less than two weeks, the pond was black with wriggling tadpoles, hundreds of thousands of them. I let the girls bring home a jarful. I don't remember what we fed them, but tadpoles will subsist on algae or boiled lettuce. They are also true omnivores and will resort to cannibalism under duress. That was undoubtedly the case, because our tadpole population diminished without evidence of carcasses.

It's possible to raise toads in captivity, but I made the girls release them. By this time, the tadpoles had all sprouted two to four limbs. We took the jar to the cottage and freed them beside our dock. The tadpoles immediately swam to a rotten log on the shoreline and started hauling themselves out of the water. They were no larger than my fingernail, but already ready to become toadlets. Toads metamorphose to their terrestrial form at a smaller size than any other amphibian. Within a few days, the fry would look like this little guy, scarcely one centimetre long.

They're a familiar sight this time of year along cottage roads and pathways. This one had more of a cinnamon colour than the others we saw last weekend.