Marguerite's Blog

Bufo marinus ( part 2 ).

Posted on 11 Jul, 2008 6 comments

We knew they were on the march and we knew they were coming. We were prepared! We were on the lookout. Reports came in which spot they had reached and finally: there they were. Ugly looking things, really. One evening my hubby who always took the dogs for a “round around the block – which was only 5 acres ) came home rather excited or upset. One of the two or a combination of the two, take your pick. In his hands he held a cane toad. When picking up the toad you grab him around his back, sort of on his hips. 4 Legs then dangle. Of course you have to be careful because they can suddenly urinate, and oh boy, you don’t want that smell on you. So he stood there on the lawn in front of the veranda, proudly showing off his first catch. We had a plastic bucket with a lid, so we put the creature in there and closed the lid firmly. He hopped around in it all night, trying to hit the ceiling. These canetoads cannot jump high. The do not climb either. They more or less run on 4 legs instead of taking the usual frog leaps. The N.T. Government has an organisation called: “Frog Watch”, which made some large steel cages, called ” Toad Busters” in several locations, one not too far from where we lived. You can only dump live toads in there. Several times a week these toads get collected by these rangers and taken to the gass chambers, where they are turned into fertiliser. So this is where we took our caught toads. After that first one he caught two in one night, then 4 and then more and more. He took off every night with a torch ( had to anyway, cause it was always dark after 6 and after dinner to see where he had to walk ) and in one year he caught over 250 toads! Can you imagine how many more there would have been, if these were not caught. I forgot how many eggs the female toad lays, but just think of a colony of toadlets roaming around, of which a great deal would be eaten by birds etc. Now to promote the catching of these unwanted foreigners the council organised family outings with sausage sizzles and free beer! Well, you’ve only got to mention beer and the average Australian joins in. So imagine this picture: whole families with buckets around the lagoons and waterholes, in rubber boots or gymboots, weaponed with a torch, catching all these toads. And I can garantee you that there were litterally thousands! At least the N.T. Governement had recognised the problem as soon as they marched across the border and did something about it. But the QLD Government just ignores the problem and almost sees this creature as a native specimen. I think it is a disgrace. We have made a canetoad fence around our property ( 1 acre ) here. It looks like bird netting, only about 1 foot high ( 30 cm ), which is enough as remember I said, they do not jump. Here too we’ve caught over one hundred last wet season. Unfortunately here is no toad buster bin. So…the most humane thing to do is let it gently go to sleep. They are cold blooded amphibians, they don’t belong here, they are a BIG threat, so we don’t feel one bit sorry to just put them in a plastic bag in an icecream container and then in the freezer. Once solid frozen we dig a hole in the garden and burry the lot. Each night my hubby goes round the block, which is on the street, and in the wet season there are litterally tens if not hundreds of toads. The dogs don’t like them, they are not interested. I think their instinct and experience tells them that they are dangerous. They’ve seen us catch them. Even I have. I don’t like killing anything, but everytime I catch one I just think of how many good creatures I have saved.
This story is just to show how unthoughtful it is to take flora and fauna outof their natural habitat and import them to regions where they do not belong.
Do you know about that kind of tree snake which accidentally was imported into Guam inside irrigation pipes? That island now has almost no birdlife left!

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