Toads on the roads – Please be careful

Toads will be crossing the roads at this time of year, and huge numbers will be killed.

Author Jess Price - Courtesy of the Sussex Wildlife Trust

"The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!"

March 2011. These adventurous words are spoken by Mr Toad in Kenneth Grahame's classic children's story The Wind in the Willows. Mr Toad may be a fictional character, but his love of travel and the open road is seated in reality. At this time of year hundreds of toads will be leaving their over-wintering sites and starting the long crawl back to their places of birth to try to reproduce. Moving along the same routes every year, a toad can travel over two kilometres to get to its preferred breeding pond.

Mass migration
Maybe toads aren't as impressive as stampeding wildebeest moving across the Serengeti or as beautiful as thousands of monarch butterflies travelling across North America, but for me the mass migration of toads is a wonderful sight that shouldn't be ignored. Migration can occur anytime between January and April, but toads most commonly emerge at dusk during after a spell of damp, warmish weather. So next time we have a bit of rain keep your eyes and ears peeled and you might be lucky enough to see this fabulous demonstration of determination on your doorstep.

To see a map of known toad crossing points, click here. 

How you can help
Unfortunately you might say that toads have a one-track mind, nothing will get in the way of their amorous feelings including roads and railways! Sadly, this means that every year scores of toads are killed by cars as they try to cross roads that have been built across their migration routes. The disruption of migration routes, along with the loss of breeding ponds, is having a significant impact of the number of toads surviving in the UK. To try to reduce the number of road casualties occurring every spring, the charity Froglife set up the Toads on Roads project over 20 years ago. This project registers toad migratory crossings, putting up road signs to help warn traffic and coordinating local volunteers who patrol the sites. If you would like to register a migratory crossing or are interested in becoming a toad patroller please look on the Toads on Roads website.