Who Doesn’t Love A Toad?
I've always loved frogs and toads and newts. We used to have a pond in our garden where I grew up in Wiltshire where we had Great Crested Newts that took up residence and I've loved amphibious pond life ever since.
Common Toads actually spend very little time in the water, and generally will live in secluded, damp, shady patches of woods for most of the year only seeking out their ponds when it's time to mate. This usually happens at the end of March or beginning of April when toads will gather in vast numbers to mate.
I went with Francis Taylor, who runs some excellent wildlife photography workshops, to check out a few spots near Sheffield where they're known to mate. After some failures where the mating activity had already taken place and the toads had retreated to their woods, we found a reservoir where the toads were abundant.
It was staggering how much toad spawn was there. As you can see in the pictures below toad spawn forms in long strands which were everywhere across the floor of the shallow edges of the reservoir. If you'd have stretched out all the spawn (which obviously is not condoned) it would have been many football pitch lengths. The underwater pictures were taken on my phone , in a plastic watertight case so that it could be activated underwater. This is not the most high-tech solution, and most of the pictures I took were terrible , but a few were acceptable and show off just how much spawn the toads create.
All of this is great news for the birds. The male toads become fixated upon mating and seem to be in a trance. They cling on to backs of the much bigger females they intend to mate, but in some cases you get multiple males all grabbing on to the same female and forming a 'toad ball'. You can see one above. Sadly this has the effect sometimes of drowning the female toad under the weight of the volume of males. In these numbers the toads are often easy pickings for gulls and other birds which was evident by the toad bones scattered across rocks amongst the bird droppings. The birds will likely get another feast as the eggs develop into tadpoles and toadlets and then make their exit from the water.
It was brilliant to see the toads doing so well, reproducing in vast numbers and I'll try and be back next year to witness the spectacle again. Who would want to miss that?
