Toads have an image problem... and it’s one they don’t deserve

L AST night there was a rain of toads. Well, more of a flash mob. As my little dogs dragged me forth for their final constitutional of the day, there were the squat little things by the dozen – sat thoughtfully here and there, not moving, not croaking, just being, as if marshalled in the night as harbingers of the apocalypse.

And such language is part of the toad’s abiding image problem. It is almost majestically ugly. It is by habit nocturnal. It has an eerie, self-possessed stillness. Our forebears long believed that they carried rabies; certainly, that the toad was the devil among us, a thing of ill omen, and the witch’s familiar.

A toad even makes an off-stage appearance in Macbeth (‘Paddock calls…’) and the late Donald MacDonald, a muchloved bard in South Uist and who once crafted an ode in improbable praise of Camilla Parker Bowles, used to love telling a toady tale.

Long ago, he retailed, there was a chief of Clan Donald, in South Uist, who did something heinously wicked – tied an errant daughter by her hair to the wrack on a tidal rock, and let her drown, that it might redound to the terror of the isles and the glory of his name.

But, thereafter, Chief MacDonald was haunted by a ‘tooooooad’ – as old Donald would stretch out the word with relish. It ranted not nor railed; neither foamed at the mouth nor dripped with poison. It was just… there. Chief MacDonald would dine, and it would hop onto the table beside him.

He would retire for the night; it would be sitting thoughtfully on his pillow. He would call his council of war; the toad invariably materialised. People murmured behind their hands as Chief MacDonald paled before the toad embodying both his increasingly tortured conscience and the damnation awaiting him.

Finally, he resolved to flee, and summoned the chiefly galley. Men manned the oars, sail was set – and, as the last moment, as the warps were loosed, the toad as if from nowhere sprang aboard, and old MacDonald’s despairing wail rang round the hills about Lochboisdale.

IT is a particularly striking tale because, well into my own lifetime, there were no amphibians in the Western Isles and yet, even in this old Hebridean tale, a toad is the central trope, menacing and malevolent.

It does not, of course, really ‘rain’ toads. It is at this time of year, on mild March nights, that they emerge from hibernation, with but one thought on their minds – the urgent business of breeding – and embark upon the most terrible journey in Britain.

Toads are readily distinguished from frogs. They are rather bigger, squat and broad, of dry warty skin, with fiery golden eyes in a wide, lugubrious face. Their hind legs, too, are significantly shorter; they can manage a modest hop but prefer a stately shuffle, and the athletic leaps of a frog are not in their repertoire.

But the main difference is in lifestyle. Frogs never range far from water and need to take frequent dips, which is why they always look wet.

A toad, by contrast, spends most of its life on land, often well away from the ditch or lochan where it began life, happy to settle amid a pile of logs or stones in your garden for months on end, emerging at dusk to make short work of worms, slugs and snails – snaffled by a long, sticky tongue.

Thought to be more intelligent than frogs, the toad has one formidable line of defence – the ability to secrete poison from a gland behind the eyes, which makes anything unwise enough to swallow or even lick it rapidly wish they hadn’t.

And, when they lay their young, unlike their daft cousins they wisely eschew water in wheel ruts or upturned bucket lids for the sensible, droughtproof depths of pools and ponds – and not in the sagolike clumps of frogspawn, but long elegant ribbons amid the underwater weeds.

But, first, the toads must get there – perhaps as much as a mile, across highways and in the teeth of thundering traffic, guided by a phenomenal homing instinct and doughtily scaling obstacle upon obstacle.

And the annual death toll is horrific: some 20 tons of toads are flattened by vehicles on Britain’s roads every spring, to the point that some local authorities (such as Powys in Wales) have actually constructed little toad tunnels beneath particularly lethal highways – or shut them down for consecutive nights during the breeding season. Toad reproduction isn’t exactly dinner and a show. Occasionally a toad will actually snatch his bride on dry land and carry her to its watery playground on his back. Sometimes, amid the protracted and gooey confusion, half a dozen particularly lusty toads will try to cover one unfortunate lady at the same time, to the point where she may actually be suffocated.

THE vast majority of Scotland’s toads are the common species, bufo bufo. But on the Solway coast – most notably at the RSPB Mersehead Reserve, in Kirkcudbrightshire – they proudly boast the rare natterjack toad, protected by law, gravely endangered and otherwise found only in a few spots in South-East England.

Smaller and more agile, the natterjack is olive green and with a distinctive yellow stripe running down its back. It moves at an impressive scurry, too, but its most endearing feature is the (male) croak.

At spring, amorous natterjack lads will sing all night long – a joyful percussion which can be heard up to a mile away and, no doubt, is irresistible to their womenfolk. If anyone did anything for the toad’s reputation in the modern era, it was Kenneth Grahame, whose Toad of Toad Hall – in The Wind in the Willows – is one of the most endearing characters in children’s fiction.

Posh, brash, extravagant, conceited, deliriously accidentprone and with a mania for fast cars, Toad is a sort of prototype Boris Johnson – until he is humbled by imprisonment.

But, with the help of a kindly girl, Mr Toad escapes in the guise of a washerwoman, finally reclaiming Toad Hall from rapacious stoats and weasels.

Beneath the bucolic charm of Grahame’s magical England, one catches the unease of his age and the strains of class struggle, the changing society that will sweep Toad and his kind away; the threat of the night, the terror of being lost. ‘There seemed to be no end to this wood, and no beginning, and no difference in it, and, worse of all, no way out…’

Still, some things never change. When the girl serves him thick buttered toast, its smell ‘simply talked to Toad... talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries’.