{"id":92359,"date":"2025-10-23T02:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T02:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/92359\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T02:59:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T02:59:07","slug":"the-cars-just-turn-them-into-mush-can-britains-toads-be-saved-from-traffic-and-terrible-decline-conservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/92359\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The cars just turn them into mush\u2019: can Britain\u2019s toads be saved from traffic and terrible decline? | Conservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 7.30 on a Friday evening, but I\u2019m not heading to the pub or putting on a film. Instead, I\u2019ve caught the train to a market town in Wiltshire, where I\u2019m meeting up with members of Warminster toad patrol<\/a>. These are volunteers who \u2013 like similar groups up and down the country \u2013 give up their evenings to protect their local toad population.<\/p>\n

For the common toad (scientific name Bufo bufo) is becoming increasingly un<\/a>common<\/a>. A recent study led by amphibian and reptile charity Froglife<\/a> showed that the UK toad population has almost halved<\/a> since 1985. To see a creature that has been a stalwart of the British countryside \u2013 not to mention a prominent feature of literature and folklore \u2013 in decline is \u201cworrying\u201d, says Dr Silviu Petrovan, senior researcher at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. Toads \u201cdon\u2019t require very specific conditions\u201d and \u201cshould be able to live quite well in most of the habitats in Britain,\u201d he says \u2013 so if even they are not managing to survive, \u201cit kind of suggests that things are not as they should be\u201d.<\/p>\n

A common toadlet in a foxglove flower. Photograph: Stephen Dalton\/Nature Picture Library<\/p>\n

Though the study didn\u2019t cover the reasons for the decline, traffic certainly plays a part: Froglife estimates that 20 tonnes of toads are killed on UK roads every year<\/a> \u2013 in other words, several hundred thousand. Unlike frogs, which would probably be happy to mate \u201cif you left out a bucket of water\u201d, according to one of Warminster toad patrol\u2019s founding members, Iain Perkins, toads like large ponds. Their ability to stay out of water for longer than frogs, means they can travel further to reach them \u2013 sometimes hundreds of metres, Petrovan says. They tend to stick to their ancestral migration routes \u2013 it\u2019s common for adult toads to return to their birth pond to mate.<\/p>\n

Appropriately enough, the first toads begin their quest for a mate around Valentine\u2019s day in February, but some move as late as April, waiting until it gets dark and travelling through the night. During that time, toads start moving from wherever they have been hibernating (often woodland) \u201call pretty much at the same time,\u201d says Perkins.<\/p>\n

Now 60, he grew up in Warminster and has been trying to protect its toad population since he was a boy. \u201cThey\u2019ve got just one focus: to go and have an orgy,\u201d he says with a laugh. If their route happens to cross a road, they could all get run over, and that mating period would never happen \u2013 preventing a new generation of toads from being born.<\/p>\n

Seeing hundreds of toad carcasses on their local roads \u201cinherently strikes a chord with people\u201d, Petrovan says, and has led to the formation of toad patrols across the UK \u2013 274 groups are currently registered with Froglife\u2019s Toads on Roads<\/a> initiative. These groups pick up toads and carry them across roads in buckets, as well as counting the number of toads they find (both dead and alive) and lobbying for other protection measures, such as road closures and underground wildlife tunnels.<\/p>\n

Patrols tend to operate during the migration season, when toad crossings are more regular. However, this means they can miss groups of toadlets, which, having existed as spawn and then tadpoles, leave their ponds over an unpredictable schedule in late summer. Because of their size \u2013 just one or two centimetres wide \u2013 \u201cthey can get obliterated by car traffic\u201d, Petrovan says. And as being run over \u201cbasically turns them into mush\u201d, it\u2019s harder to get data on them. At least when adult toads are killed, their carcasses can be counted.<\/p>\n

\u2018Toads should be able to live quite well in most of the habitats in Britain\u2019 \u2026 a common toad in Devon. Photograph: Mike Hill\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Unlike most patrols, the Warminster volunteers, who are in their eighth year of operating, go out year-round \u2013 not every night, but whenever conditions are warm and wet, or if someone has posted about a toad sighting in their WhatsApp group. When I ask to join them on patrol, they admit it is \u201cnot a toady night\u201d \u2013 toad hibernation season has begun and it\u2019s been a dry day \u2013 but several of the volunteers gamely agree to walk up and down their route with me and see what we can find. \u201cIf anyone can find any toads tonight, that pair will find one,\u201d says patrol manager Ria Painter-Coates , pointing to her 14-year-old son, Dexter, and Iain Perkins. We\u2019ve been out for two hours without a single toad sighting, and now they have climbed over a barbed wire fence to check under some logs.<\/p>\n

Iain Perkins, Warminster toad patrol. Photograph: Sam Frost\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Ria and Dexter joined the patrol a year and a half ago. Dexter loves all things nature-related and has an ambition to become a conservationist, so his mother started to look for things they could do together to protect local wildlife. Now she loves it as much as he does, the 41-year-old small business owner tells me \u2013 so when the group was looking for a new manager recently, she decided to step up.<\/p>\n

Dexter, too, has played an important role in the group. A video he made, imploring the local council to close a road through a nature reserve during migration season, swung the decision the group\u2019s way, Perkins says. After a year of lobbying, the council agreed to an \u201caccess-only\u201d restriction between 5pm and 5am from February through to April. Most drivers duly avoided the road.<\/p>\n

Dexter of Warminster toad patrol, with an earlier find. Photograph: Supplied image<\/p>\n

Several cars go past when I\u2019m out on patrol (outside the restriction period) and we find some casualties as a result \u2013 no toads, but three squashed newts. We spot one living newt as well, and Dexter is particularly pleased to see a harvestman<\/a>, which dances in his hands. Yet despite the group\u2019s best efforts to show me a toad, the local population has clearly settled down for the colder months. It seems that I wouldn\u2019t have had any more luck anywhere else in the country \u2013 all the patrol groups I contact explain that it\u2019s near-impossible at this time of year.<\/p>\n

The group expects to help approximately 10,000 adult toads across the road<\/p>\n

One email I receive from a Henley toad patrol volunteer, who has kindly taken the trouble to check for toads in Oaken Grove in the Chilterns, thought to be the largest accurately monitored toad population in the UK, arrives in my inbox with the subject line: \u201cNo toads\u201d. However, in February and March, he tells me, the group expects to help approximately 10,000 adult toads across the road.<\/p>\n

How much of a difference can these groups actually make? \u201cThe fact that people are doing this consistently on cold, damp and unpleasant late nights is quite extraordinary,\u201d Petrovan says. \u201cThat\u2019s something that very much should be celebrated.\u201d However, while toad patrols are able to slow the decline, they cannot prevent it entirely \u2013 not least because traffic is not the only threat.<\/p>\n

Out on patrol \u2026 Photograph: Sam Frost\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

The climate crisis has meant longer periods of dry weather, which create the wrong conditions for some of the creatures that toads eat, such as worms and slugs, while higher water temperatures have led to an increase of blue-green algae, which can be toxic to toads. Milder winters also cause toads to wake up from their hibernation more frequently, disrupting the energy conservation vital to their life cycle. Habitat destruction \u2013 particularly the loss of large ponds \u2013 is another menace.<\/p>\n

Ria Painter-Coates, Warminster toad patrol. Photograph: Sam Frost\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Petrovan is \u201calways a bit worried about putting too much of a utilitarian spin on biodiversity\u201d, he says. \u201cThere is a big value in just having these animals around.\u201d But toads do have an important role to play in the food chain, eating pretty much any invertebrates or small animals they can fit in their mouths and in turn feeding a number of birds and mammals, such as hedgehogs and otters (which have a grisly method of skinning them with their teeth to avoid their poison glands, leaving behind an inside-out toad skin, \u201ca bit like a sock\u201d, as Petrovan puts it). He also points out that by improving things for toads \u2013 ie, creating more ponds, conserving woodland and installing toad tunnels \u2013 \u201cwe\u2019ll improve them for a whole bunch of other species\u201d.<\/p>\n

Another reason to try to keep toads around is their \u201cimportant cultural value\u201d, Petrovan adds. Myths and folklore around toads go back centuries \u2013 they have long been associated with witchcraft, as witches\u2019 familiars or ingredients in folk remedies or black magic. Even the symbol of a toad was at one point thought to possess healing powers: women in central Europe would clench a toad-shaped effigy made of wax or iron between their knees during labour, which was believed to reduce childbirth pain.<\/p>\n

Another folk tradition involved \u201ctoadstones\u201d \u2013 a stone that was thought to be extracted from inside a toad\u2019s head (Shakespeare, in As You Like It, writes of \u201cthe toad, ugly and venomous\u201d wearing \u201cyet a precious jewel in his head\u201d) and have healing powers. In fact, so-called toadstones usually had nothing to do with toads, and the ones set in rings in the Middle Ages, including one currently on display at the V&A<\/a>, were made from the fossilised teeth of a fish of the Jurassic and Cretaceous period called Lepidotes.<\/p>\n

A female common toad carries her male partner. Photograph: Supplied image<\/p>\n

Toads have long had demonic associations: a devil\u2019s coat-of-arms created in the Middle Ages was emblazoned with three toads, and in John Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost, Satan appears as a toad to pour poison into Eve\u2019s ear. But happier literary depictions are also abundant, such as George Orwell\u2019s essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, which describes the spawning of toads as \u201cone of the phenomena of Spring which most deeply appeal\u201d to him, or the much-loved children\u2019s series about a pair of adorable amphibians, Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel. The most famous literary toad, of course, is Kenneth Grahame\u2019s Mr Toad from The Wind in the Willows, who, ironically, given the amount of toad deaths they cause today, is known for his love of cars.<\/p>\n

But unless we want these characters to be the only form in which toads exist, drastic change is needed. Tunnels built under roads could be one way to provide a permanent solution to crossing deaths, Petrovan says \u2013 but he warns that they need to be implemented with care. Results in Switzerland, where tunnels have been built on many of the country\u2019s key toad crossing sites, have been \u201csomewhat mixed\u201d, and toads failed to use tunnels built in Powys<\/a> in 2010.<\/p>\n

Toads captured to be helped across the road. Photograph: Allan Staley<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a pretty horrible example from the Netherlands where they installed some toad tunnels, but the distance between them was too big,\u201d Petrovan adds. Because fencing was put up between the tunnels, toads in those areas couldn\u2019t get through, \u201cwhich meant that in effect you were kind of killing them softly.\u201d<\/p>\n

We \u201cneed more science\u201d, he says, which he admits \u201csounds a bit self-serving\u201d coming from a scientist. \u201cBut I do think that there is something to be said about trying to better understand the kind of very specific reasons for their declines.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I chat to Dexter out on toad patrol in Warminster, he tells me most of his friends his own age aren\u2019t interested in toad conservation. He tries to soak up as much knowledge from the older wildlife enthusiasts he meets as he can, but worries \u201cit\u2019s going to be quite hard unless we actually get people actively into it\u201d. There are \u201cso many other things to distract people\u201d and most teenagers associate protecting nature with older people. \u201cI think the whole idea of nature and conservation and everything will sort of die,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s why we really need young people to go out and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s 7.30 on a Friday evening, but I\u2019m not heading to the pub or putting on a film.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":{"0":"post-92359","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}