| Every dog eats a toad - once! The toads have glands on their skin that produces some nasty stuff that causes the dog to salivate until their mouth look like they have eaten soap. So they eat a toad only once…. The toads are in no way rare but they live in vegetation so they are not seen that often. Today we went down to the seaside together with the dogs and one of them found this one in the tall grass. I do not know if they can be called beautiful and I am not sure if they are ugly. In a way they might be called "good looking", perhaps… |
| In order to portray the fellow we needed to take it out from the grass. The day was very hot and we wanted the toad to be comfortable during the photography session so we cooled down a black stone in the sea and then used it as a "toad stool" (we also have several delicious mushrooms in a group called "Toad stools"). Appearently the wet stone was comfortabel and cool since the toad was very patient and co-operative during the photography and made only one attempt to jump away. |
| While we were busy portraying the toad the dogs did different things. The sea is no more than a stone-throw from our house. In the summer we have put-out partridge running around in the neighborhood. When we were finished with the toad we started to look for the dogs. We found Briz in the sea but her neck had grown unusually long, she looked like a sea monster, actually. The reason for this rapid growth of her neck was obviously a partridge that had flown over her head. The bird had been flushed by Foxy who has made a "Pater Noster works" out of the birds. She finds them and flushes them and then stands there looking after them as they fly away. Then she runs a really big circle around our 20 acre site like trying to forget where the birds flu to. Then she searches and finds them again, points for a while and then flushes if we show no interest in her activities. She does this a couple of times - perhaps with a bath in the sea between - then, due to the current hot summer, she is totally finished and happy for the rest of the day. The partridge also gains from these exercises. They get very vary and they learn to fly very strongly. Excercising reared, put-out partridge with birddogs is in fact a recommended practice. This helps them to survive all the way into late autumn. However the biotope around our village does not support them during the winter - anymore. No later back than around 1960 there was still wild partridge on our land. Then the modern agriculture reached even our part of the world….. |
| Now, finally, here is the answer to your question: How big are our toads? Well, in the best case around 2 or 2,5 times the size of this medium size fellow! |
photo & text Torsti Mäkinen ©