My first impressions of toads came about when my father Len Hansen rented a seaside house high on a sand dune in North Truro, Cape Cod back in 1954. 

 

With Cape Cod Bay stretching out to the west, and Twinefield so abundant in wildflowers to the east, North Truro became a naturalist's dream, where I could search for sea shells at the seashore, or chase beetles and butterflies with my trusty green butterfly net. 

 

Twinefield was a treasure trove for wildlife — a vast glacial rolling sandplain shaped by successive glaciers, its sandy soil rich in silicon, thus able to stimulate growth for a diverse biota. A place where in successive years I would expand my insect collection to fill cigar boxes with every order of insects abounding in beach plum, ox-eye daisy and milkweed. During our brief summer vacation there, we boys would exclaim in our excitement, "Oh here is another hoppy toad," one of many Fowler's toads (Bufo woodhousei fowleri ) that inhabited the moist surroundings, at home in the Ammophyla beach grass, thickets of beach plum, bayberry, and black cherry bushes. 

 

They sparkled in rich colors of green amber on beige and reddish tinted warts. Most anurans have those glistening eyes, gold on black irises so beguiling around the dark pupils. Today I reflect on a favorite analogy, the riveting eye suggests a solar eclipse in pictorial aura.

 

In the distinct toad majority in the Outer Cape, Fowler's toads turned up in the most unusual of places. When we Hansens first moved in to rent Riding Lights, we would wash the sand and salt from our feet in the outdoor shower where toads would be drinking and basking in the moisture near my feet. As dusk fades into darkness, the happy surprise would gather under the night lights where moths were fluttering about the front door and the toads would snatch bugs with outstretched tongue.

 

In later years, mother Eleanor added much needed color and variety to Grace's original garden. Our smallest and perhaps most acrobatic butterflies are the skippers, flitting and somersaulting to alight and drink heartily the nectar abounding at yellow sickle-leaved coreopsis and succulent pink live forever sedums of autumn. These hearty late bloomers signaled oases for many fall migrants including painted ladies, red admirals and of course monarchs on there odyssey to over-winter in Mexico. 

 

Our newly found next-door neighbors, the Bergmarks, added a lot to share our zeal for this undiscovered country, and while still in our teens, Billy Atwood, who today is a nuclear physicist in California, suggested we should include the Baltimore checkerspot in our survey, as he too had a keen interest in insects. Still unfamiliar to me then, in later years I would come across a thriving colony in Twinefield, that yielded a rare phenotype checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton p. superba) that I wrote about featured in The Cape Naturalist ( Museum of Natural History, Brewster Cape Cod 1991). 

 

Mom had selected certain sedums for flanking the front steps, including creeping thyme, leading to the archway and to the upper terrace and patio laid in herring-bone brick, where Eleanor planted centrantha to attract butterflies. Positioned in the center of the pink profusion was one very placid Fowler's toad, as if savoring the aroma emitting from the pink profusion, waiting patiently for a tasty tidbit, a moth a fly or creeping caterpillar.

 

Toward evening, we boys, Erik and Bjorn and I would walk one half-mile down Pond Road to Bob Dutra's Market to get groceries, fine meats and ice cream. We would find too many toads crushed on the macadam, a country road still warm enough for basking toads to absorb the heat of day. So many toads gone from passing motorcars suggested this long and narrow pond was the source of their biogenesis — Pilgrim Pond, just a stone's toss to where a bronze placard states that Pilgrims explored the area and camped overnight near by. Those years, 1954-56, we were still engaging characters in Walt Disney's "Wind in The Willows" featuring Mr. Toad and his passion for motor cars and who justified chasing stoats out of Toad Hall. However, we became acquainted with actual toads and the need to address real science of toad biology in the face of such roadside losses.

 

At that time Pilgrim Pond was open to Cape Cod Bay, and much later when trains needed railroads to travel and haul cargo, the railroads built a sand embankment that closed off the estuary that in time became fresh water inviting amphibians and toads to inhabit a habitat in transition. 

 

Today we are lucky to see a toad or two. What sheer delight to find a black and yellow spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) in the fallen leaves and mosses near the foundations and storm cellars. Local serpents include the puff adder or hog-nosed snake known to feed on toads, salamanders, and rodents; they, too, have all but disappeared.

 

Reminiscing the bygone halcyon grandeur of trilling toads in persistent chorus line called us to fine-tune our ears and later investigate the toads' primeval call of the wild. Today Twinefield is overrun with invasive tartarian honeysuckle, that grows fast and displaces native beach plum, bayberry, and broom crowberry, where insect life is but a fraction of halcyon grandeur. Luckily informed citizens are planting for replenishing gardens for species diversity. An odd twist but most interesting for habitat utilization, the butterfly red admiral is sipping sap at the honeysuckle and huckleberry, a reward for enduring a fascinating odyssey emigrating across open ocean to find nourishing habitat.

 

Spring arriving in all its raucous and deliberate awakening is heralded by a symphony of vanguard spring peepers, hyla crucifer, that transform the cold and drear into a circus of vivacious trilling. As if some key call, perhaps a single small frog bleats out a call to colors, that soon is heard by every male pinkletink in the marsh, as Joseph Wood Krutch deems them, that for days to follow can be heard booming from almost every pond's edge or vernal pool in the dune lands. And not just across Cape Cod, but well throughout much of Massachusetts and rural New England. How such a small creature with delicate bones and extremely thin skin can survive the freezing cold of long winters is truly profound.

 

Another triumph of evolutionary biology is how the frog's throat pouch, millimeters thin and extremely elastic is able to maintain inflation like a balloon's expansion to the max without bursting, and amplifying the vocal mating call so resolute and endearing. Our heart-felt prayers to our creator may temper the adequate rainfall, so to preserve and replenish the wetlands, pinkletinks' home for sustenance and procreation for eons of time, all too often upset by global warming, extreme drought, and excessive pollution by man and habitat desecration. Here in the last wild places in the Berkshires as well, pinkletinks resound in springtime fervor, in glades and swampy glens, even small fragments of dales with just inches of aquifer between major roads and highways, insistently defining their age old rite of spring, clinging to our shepherding vows to preserve their wild places and isolated mosaics of their origin.

 

But here in the Berkshires where Western Mass is so mountainous the toad species shifts to the predominant American toad, Bufo (Anaxyrus) americanus, population dynamics become a major focus of what is colonial convergence by nature. Resilient to prolonged cold of snowy winter, spending long days in aestivation, or dormancy wrapped in the muddy soils of woodland surrounding Greylock Reservoir, the toads emerge from subterranean tunnels to breath air anew with lungs acquired prior to the last winter spent underground. 

 

Gills that enable tadpoles to breath underwater are replaced by lungs during the adaptive transition of toad leaving fresh water to exorcise its new ability to live on land. According to Google toads then follow the scent of lake water, and hop to gather in mass numbers to initiate their frenzied courtship and at random choose the mate, and perhaps mate a second time (?). Embryology from fertile egg to full adult toad is consistent in development with other Anurans: Within three to 12 days, eggs hatch and larvae become tadpoles growing into toadlets in two months. They reach sexual maturity in two to three years, according to the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory.

 

Small larvae grow into tadpoles with long muscular tails for swift getaways. They exhibit extraordinary growth during their first spring as they sprout hind limbs and then forelimbs, and absorption of tale-bud. Here in the Berkshires mature toads appear about the first and second weeks of May.

 

Winds have driven broken pine branches to gather at lake's edge where a multitude of toads gather in mass mating, and timed with warming vernal sunshine, toads pursue mating with tenacious intent. However to obtain fertilization the males must first attract a female done by persistent trilling; males have evolved a very elastic throat pouch that on cue is inflated with air and the toad commences the primeval calling — a long trilling of high pitched droning lasting 5-10 seconds. 

 

In three days time everything is gone — all toads have vanished, and not one egg strand is visible. Where so suddenly do they go? Even those washed downstream over the damned spillway and cascading brook are but ghosts in silent mystery.

 

What becomes perplexing is how insistent the toads are to quick-mate at lake's edge in their sagacious affinity coined in the term amplexus. And then they conduct a mass exodus, wherein the male climbs aboard the female and wraps his forearms around her, squeezing her midsection so that she releases her pre-formed eggs into the water, and he spreads his spermatozoa over the eggs encased in double gelatinous strings, yielding up to 2,000 to 3,000 eggs! How the sperm can penetrate the mucus-like strands and then merge with an egg completing fertilization is one of nature's special chemical accomplishments: chemicals in the ova react with those in the sperm, and that signals the completion of the act of miosis, the conclusion or forthcoming union of haploid chromatin and alleles (coupling of genes from male with those of female toad). Astounding! Mitosis (simply cell division) is quite different and quite complex in its own process.

 

If whatever information available on Google and Wikipedia is true and indeed are reliable sources, the toads may hop back into the woodlands where they disperse as terrestrial amphibians foraging for insects and worms throughout the summer months rather than returning to the depths in the lake. 

 

When cold weather approaches the toads will dig underground backwards with small cornfield tubercles, or spades, not as exaggerated as in true spade-foot toads, attached to their hind feet that enable them to excavate or bury themselves deep enough to escape the upper frost zone. They hibernate, sometimes inside logs, in old discarded burrows, and under leaves, wherein their metabolism decreases and heartbeat slows considerably, so to conserve energy needed to get through the long winter ahead. Thus this species of toad spends more time on land than underwater. 

 

Such ingenuity is yes a bit perplexing; and indeed amphibiously astonishing!