By Andrew Whitwell Thursday, March 12 2009

The birthday lime was on a secluded balcony, high on Hololo Hill, looking down the Cascade Valley to bright-lights Port-of-Spain and a sliver of moon-silvered sea. The ol’ talk ebbed and flowed.

‘Eh, I saw yu name in dat magazine. Yu write dat stuff on iguanas?

‘Yeah.’

‘Yu writin’ more?’

‘Hm hmm; I think I’ll write on toads.’

The intelligent young lady at his side had been listening. Her arms flew up, her hands with fingers extended flapped frantically beside her cheeks in a bizarre parody of a 1920’s flapper doing the Charleston. Her eyes stared, her mouth opened. “Aaarghhh, they’re horrible, horrible!”

Our host, six foot something and built to match, ceased his laconic lolling, and leaned forward. “Boy, I ‘fraid dem ting too much. When I see one, I run boy”.

The lady returned to the conversation. “I pour salt on them from the stairs”. I almost said ‘Have you ever had acid poured over you?’ But why spoil a good lime with education.

This was not the first time that I had come across chemical warfare as a mechanism for deterring ambulatory amphibians adjacent to our dwellings. Some years ago, when I viewed the house in Cascade that I eventually bought, the vendor, a middle-aged lady with a penchant for cats, showed me round. She must have misunderstood my long stare of attraction at the forested hillside behind the house. “Use black disinfectant” she quietly confided. Then strongly and firmly, “You must put black disinfectant round the house; it keeps the toads away”. I silently agreed. The regular, liberal application of a pungent poison would keep many things away. To ask her why, in the face of such certainty, was too daunting. Clearly everyone in their right mind wanted to keep toads away.

That bastion of the English Language, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, records our prejudice. It opens its discourse on toad n. with a clear biological description. But one other meaning is added: “A repulsive or detestable person”.

I ignored the good lady’s advice, and now my nighttime garden is delightfully populated by all sizes of toads hopping and slopping about their business. The addition of a pond has pleased them immensely.

TOAD SLAUGHTER

At the end of a long dry season, the arrival of the rains heralds the annual slaughter of toads. Emerging hungry and gaunt from the period of drought, they go in search of mates and food, and many of their traditional routes are now crossed by our own. The spectacle of our roads randomly patterned with the blackened cardboard cutouts of flattened toads, is so common as to be unnoticed by most.

We also suffer from this carnage. Toads will eat anything that will fit into their mouths, including house flies, baby rats and bachac. A brief examination of toad scats from round my house showed that they contained from 50 to 500 bachac heads each. Every squashed toad represents about 100,000 bachac per year, left alive to destroy our plants. They are beneficial predators par excellence.

I have two prevailing images of toads in my head. One is from my early childhood in Zimbabwe, before pesticides were used indiscriminately. Every rainy season, two or three colonies of termites would swarm in our back garden. I would sit happily on the lawn, next to the heaving exit from the nest, surrounded by lizards and toads and the occasional chameleon, whilst birds swooped low overhead, all gorging on the emerging millions. The toads wasted no energy. They sat still and quiet by the hole, slightly leaning forward, and when a termite climbed a grass stalk in just the right place, the tongue would flash, the jaws would snap, the throat would gulp; again, and again, and again. Just as the toads do today on our compost heap, though their target is the house flies and blow flies that congregate on the most recent additions of kitchen scraps.



RAINY SEASON

The other unforgettable memory is from two or three rainy seasons back. Late one evening I was sitting and reading in the patio, which is raised one step’s height above the outside walkway round the house. A movement through the open door caught my eye. It was the back of a toad, appearing and disappearing as it hopped along the paving. It was followed by a second back, and then a third. Then, a little closer together than before, the three backs returned in the opposite direction. About half a minute later, a triangular nose with two dark nostrils poked above the step followed by a pair of eyes.

Then, like three stooges on a stakeout, two more pairs of eyes rose over the step and balefully surveyed the scene. Obviously I was considered harmless, as one after the other the three toads jumped up into the patio and hopped and crawled around the walls to see if any especially scrumptious insects had dropped from the lights.

From there, they clambered up the next step into the living room and continued their circumlocutory perambulations, indifferent to the routine movements of my family. Eventually, when it was time to lock up and go to bed, I had to gently pick them up and put them out, along with the dog.

Perhaps Rat, in The Wind in the Willows has it right. “He is indeed the best of animals, so simple, so good-natured, and so affectionate. Perhaps he’s not very clever — we can’t all be geniuses; and it may be that he is both boastful and conceited. But he has got some great qualities, has Toady.”

That is indeed so. They are princes and princesses unto themselves and no osculatory transformation is necessary.



Andy Whitwel is managing director and owner of The Pathmaster Ltd.



The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Guardian Life of the Caribbean Limited.