My grandson, Silas, and I found some big toads in our safaris around the backyard this summer. Most of them holding still in hopes we’ll pass them over. Anyway, that’s what they seem to be doing.

They look like curmudgeons. Whether they really are curmudgeonly, of course, no one actually knows. Only toads know what it’s like to be a toad.

Like all animals, and humans, toads do have patterns of behavior, though, which I suppose you would describe differently according to whether you were about to be eaten by the toad, or about to eat it, or just watching it. To a slug or earthworm, a toad must — at some level of worm psychology (more on this word later) — look like a ferocious monster, with gaping maw emitting some kind of lightning. To a raccoon, a toad might look something like the way we see lobsters, which have a certain dangerous ugliness — an experienced raccoon would be wary of the toad’s parotid glands on its back that secrete painful cardiotoxic steroids.

To humans, who do not normally eat toads and as far as I know are not eaten by them, they appear curmudgeonly. But also, when you get past their ugliness, there are further complexities.

I found in a summary of a study of amphibian roadkill the phrase “psychological barriers” referring to the inner life of toads. The study was explaining how amphibians (including toads, whose name it turns out is just a convention — toads are actually among the taxonomic families of frogs) play unseen but critical roles in their ecosystems, and how dangerous declines in their populations in recent decades are due to chemical pollution and natural population fluctuations, among other things such as habitat fragmentation in the form of roads.

Roads and ditches “may act as physical and psychological barriers for amphibian movement” to and from breeding grounds, the summary said. The study did not further specify what goes on in a toad’s head. The point was that toads who travel certain routes in droves to get to shallow water to breed can be stymied by linear landscape structures. A new ditch in their path, apparently, can perplex them mightily. Of course, they do cross roads to get to the other side, too, especially in low places where I have run over uncountable numbers of them on rainy nights despite my best efforts to slowly dodge around them.

It seems like toads have some difficulty clearly understanding what’s going on. At least, so it seems to me, a human, who can relate. They keep crossing the road even though up to half of their relatives are getting mashed in the process. When a snake or skunk threatens to eat them, their best bet is to patiently abide, blend into the scenery and rely on their parotid poisons, because when they panic and jump off wildly, they usually get caught. This is Silas’ experience, anyway.

Their mating scene can be chaos. The male American toads (scientific name Bufo americanus, the most common species in Maine) arrive at the breeding grounds around late April and set up camp on shore, where they start singing, mighty trills lasting up to 30 seconds. Every little while the male swims out to see if he’s attracted anybody. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in his passion, he tackles anything that looks toadlike, because from a distance he can’t really tell a male from a female. The females are bigger than the males, and their skin is noticeably rougher, traits obvious only to us, apparently. The innocent male bystander tries to wrestle off the attacker, and eventually reality comes clear and the attacker returns to his spot on shore.

Whether he feels dejected or not, no one knows.

The females prefer the males with the longest, richest trills. The zoologists can only guess why, of course, speculating that more effort in song might signal more effort in mating. I have my doubts about speculating on what goes on in the female toad’s mind with regard to males.

Except when gathering to mate, toads mostly live alone. Like most curmudgeons. Whether toads think curmudgeonly thoughts, or have curmudgeonly feelings, it’s hard to say, and better not to panic and jump off in wild speculative directions. That could lead to embarrassing presumptions about the inner life of toads. Which clearly exists, despite the impossibility of our ever having the faintest understanding of it.

Silas, meanwhile, the toad stalker, is figuring all this out on his own 6-year-old terms. Which I can remember, just barely, myself.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “A Backyard Book of Spiders in Maine” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.

 

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