Frogs & toads
Some observations, some mysteries to solve and an enquiry from a villager.
First up. A bit of a mystery for me! Why were there so many squashed toads on the in October? Because they’d been run over. . Yes ok, enough with the sarcasm...
Having been run over they were less easy to identify, I am assuming that they were toads but could of course been frogs. What’s the difference? I hear you cry. Toads are warty right? Right! Toads tend to be a bit bigger than frogs and crawl rather than jump.
There are two of each species native to the UK but you are only likely to see either the ‘common toad’ with the brilliant Latin name Bufo bufo somehow beautifully onomatopoeic.
The word bufo’s origins actually comes from an ancient belief that a mythical stone thought to be an antidote to poison, called ‘bufonite’, could be found in a toad's head. Those silly people that believe these things!! What do you mean I can’t dig up these 300 million year old trees, it’s just gooey black stuff, it’ll be fine!! I digress... Or the ‘common frog’ Rana temporaria. Somewhat peculiarly, depending on the origin, the word is often wonderfully poetic, in Arabic it means "eye-catching" or "beautiful" in Sanskrit, "king" or "nobility"; Norse "queenly" and in Latin "frog"!
What’s the word for multiple digressions? Neither toads nor frogs need to live in water but they migrate up to a kilometer back to their ancestral breeding grounds in spring, when they may and do indeed get run over. Both require it to be cool and wet but toads mostly live in grassy habitats and frogs' woody habitats, though both may return to water to hunt.
Perhaps the answer to my mystery is that a habitat was disturbed? Anyone that can shed some light on this for me please get in touch.
I observed a lovely beetle, just along Pottle Street. It was a ‘woodland dor’ beetle, one of eight species of Earth-boring dung beetle. Other species of ‘dor’ beetle are the ‘common dor’ and hilariously the ‘common dumble dor’. Is that where J.K Rowling got the professor's name from, do you think?
Also of note, are the flowering times of our primroses, some of which have been out since mid October, several months earlier than I’d expect. Another flower that is getting my attention is red campion. This flower by our little apple tree has been out since spring. I heard an interesting fact about red campion from... Oh hold on, what’s that sound, yep, it’s a name dropping… Charlie Dimmock, who tells me it’s called red campion although it’s pink, because it was named before we had a word for pink..?
Lastly, an enquiry from a local gentleman farmer. Flying spiders… do they exist?
He was telling me about a flying spider from the New Forest that attaches itself to horses' tails and then crawls on the buttocks of the horse with claws that irritate horses to distraction. Well, this is mostly correct as it turns out except that the story is happier in some respects and more disturbing in others. Happier because, thank goodness, spiders don’t fly, but well… flies do, and that’s exactly what this is: the ‘New Forest’ fly, Hippobosca equina. And it does exactly as I was told, it is a blood sucking fly that can’t store it’s food so needs to feeds often and attaches itself to horses and cattle of the New Forest, where although bothered by this, the animals of this region are habituated to it, but if by any means an animal is transferred from another location and a horse that has thus far existed without it, that’s another story! The fly does land on the horse and attach itself by means of sharp claws, not to the buttocks but, let’s just say, much MUCH more tender areas, it might be an understatement to say that it comes as a bit of a shock to the horse…
photo: Common toad courtesy of Frog Life.
