TOAD TALK
A youngsters, we never touched toads. They gave you warts.
Everybody “knew” that – adults included – so it wasn't a difficult thing to do since adults didn't touch them either. That made it easier for young girls and boys to refrain from taking the ugly little brownish-gray creatures in hand. However, since adults tended to thing and speak of toads as being ugly, nasty, filthy and repulsive so boys and girls, out of simply curiosity, seemed to be attracted to toads even more
.
We respected the frog and toads as gallant bug scavengers and, probably attributed more garden protection to them than they really deserved, but the main stage of development which fascinated us was the “tadpole”stage. That was the few days in which the egg was developing the general shape of small fish minnow-like, lithe and lively but with a long tail which made it, to us, at least, more of a “fish” than a frog. What kid, reared of a farm or near a gently flowing unspoiled creek, has not gathered in shoals of tadpoles and watched them gyrate and spill over each other in the still water? Small inlets of curbed creek water teemed with tadpoles. We used to dam up little sections of the streams edge and herd tadpoles into the inlet we created. A thin weed with a seed growth at the end would lure them, if deftly handled. It took a lot of silence and patience which most of us did not have in abundance, so we did a lot of plain old dipping to get our stock.
The frog stays in the tadpole stage for about twelves days or so, and kid interest did not always last that long, so we never really found out, for sure, which ones matured to be leggy jumping frogs or which ones were stub-legged walkers – toads. True frogs would have we-looking skins and like damp, cool living places; true toads would have dry-looking, warty surfaced skin coverings, so we could not have become experts on many of them regardless of our attention to them. Each, at birth had tiny gills and in the ten-twelve day tad period, the skin gradually grew over that area to hide them completely. They became amphibia and returned to the water only to breed. They stayed nearby water as a rule but could leave such areas for extended periods of time without suffering ill effects.
Some people actually raise toads as a hobby. You find their eggs hanging on water plants like littles strings of black-eyed pearls. True Frogs lay their eggs in batches or clumps. Pine tree needles are toxic to young toads, too, so be careful where you try raise them.You must have fresh water. There are exotic styles among toads, too.: Colorful Cane Toads in South America weighing in , commonly, at four pounds each.
Which was it, I'm wondering, that the young girl had to kiss in the fable to bring forth her Prince Charming?
A.L.M. September 14, 2004 [c509wds]
