Toad alert

I may not have mentioned it before, but last week I took a few days off from work. Not that I really needed a holiday, but I still had 6.6 holidays remaining from last year. The general rule is that you need to use them up before the end of Easter break (April 16^th). If you fail to do so, you simply lose them, which would be a real shame. I stayed home on Wednesday and Thursday. As I don’t work on Fridays I had five consecutive days to myself.

When I returned to work on Monday I saw this sign by the side of the road at only a hundred or so metres from the main entrance to our office building’s underground parking lot.

Image from the internet.

Our offices sit in the middle of a park, smack between two ponds. I don’t know whether these ponds are natural or artificial, but they do attract a lot of wildlife. Every now and then we see herons hovering over the surface of the water surface, foraging. In some places the ponds are rather shallow and on a clear day you can easily spot the carp fish cruising over the bottom. Some of them are pretty big; too big to be scooped out of the water and carried off by a heron. So I guess that there must be other delectable creatures living in or around the ponds.

Judging by the new sign toads could be one of them. This time of year they migrate from one pond to the other to procreate. To get to their destination they need to cross the narrow asphalt road that leads to the entrance of the car park. I’ve seen images on television of people roaming the countryside looking for these toad crossings in an attempt to protect the animals from being run over by cars. They await the amorous amphibians on one side of the road, where they herded them into buckets and basins. The toads are then carried to the other side, where they are released.

Until now, I haven’t seen a toad or a ‘toad-crosser’ (aka a person who helps the toads to the other side of the road) yet. Maybe they operate during the night.