Frogs and Toads on the Road
by Our common amphibians are at danger from speeding traffic on the roads.
The bleeps sounding from Alison’s computer were ominous. When I looked over my daughter’s shoulder all I saw was a six-lane motorway with traffic streaming in both directions.
“What are you playing?”, I asked. “Frogger,” was the reply. “I have to get a little frog across the highway without it being squashed by a truck.”
As she spoke, a red sports car sped up the outside lane. Alison wrenched her joystick to the right but her reactions were too slow. Bleep! Another frog bit the dust.
The hazards which frogs face on our roads are not confined to children’s computer games. In real life they frequently find that a highway straddles their territory and they must hop a perilous path across the Tarmac to reach some chosen pond or ditch.
Near Brechin, a number of road signs warn drivers to slow down and give the frogs a chance.
The migration of frogs – and their larger cousins the toads – across quite expansive tracts of countryside is usually associated with their hibernation and mating patterns. Hopping or waddling, as the case may be, those engaging amphibians follow an annual routine which evolved long before mankind invented the infernal combustion engine. Nowadays, largely because of our march towards “civilisation”, neither the common frog nor the common toad are nearly as common as they were when I was a boy.
In those days, a trip to collect spawn for the classroom was an almost obligatory part of the annual cycle. Today, there are hosts of kids for whom contact with the frog is likely to be confined to a computer screen.
In winter frogs hibernate deep in the mud at the bottom of a pond or in a ditch or marsh which is sufficiently protected to resist freezing solid. They will remain in their sluggish torpor until February when they begin their migration back to the pond of their birth.
It is because the waters which are most suitable for breeding are not necessarily best provided for a safe winter sleep that the springtime migration is so necessary a part of the frogs’ lifestyle.
Normally the males reach their breeding pond first and wait for their brides, croaking almost incessantly as they anticipate the coming nuptials. When, perhaps within a few days, the females arrive, the eggs will be laid. The surrounding jelly rapidly absorbs water and becomes buoyant, forming the masses of spawn which were once so familiar.
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