Amphibians
Common Toad
Bufo bufo · also called European toad, common toad
The common toad is the amphibian most Europeans have actually met — the heavy, dry-skinned, unhurried animal that turns up under a plant pot or crossing a lane on a wet night. It is a patient predator, a chemically defended one, and a creature of fixed habits, walking back to the pond of its birth every spring no matter what has been built across the way.
Overview
Common toads live across most of Europe and into western Asia and northwest Africa, in woodland, hedgerows, rough grassland, farmland, parks, and gardens — generally drier habitats than the common frog uses. They are nocturnal and terrestrial for most of the year, sheltering by day under logs, stones, and in burrows, and emerging at night to hunt. They move by crawling and short hops rather than leaping.
Chemistry, not speed
A toad is too slow to flee, so it relies on poison and bluff. The two large parotoid glands behind the eyes, and smaller glands across the back, release bufotoxins — bitter compounds that affect the heart — when the toad is seized, usually enough to make a dog drop it and drool. Faced with a threat it will also inflate itself and rise up on stiff legs to look too big to swallow, or play dead. Some predators, notably grass snakes and hedgehogs, are undeterred.
The spring migration
Common toads are intensely faithful to their natal pond. On the first mild, damp nights of spring, adults set off — sometimes from kilometres away — and walk back to it along traditional routes used for generations, navigating by magnetic sense, smell, and memory. Males often catch a ride on a female’s back for the last stretch. Females lay strings of eggs wound through pondweed.
Toads and roads
Where a road crosses a migration route, the results are grim — hundreds or thousands of toads flattened on a single busy night, because the animals will not change the route. In Britain and Europe, volunteer “toad patrols” carry toads across in buckets on peak nights, and some crossings have tunnels or fencing.
Status
The common toad is Least Concern but declining — long-term UK monitoring suggests numbers have fallen by roughly two-thirds since the 1980s, driven by pond loss, farmland intensification, road mortality, and drier springs.
Common Toad: common questions
Do toads give you warts?
No. This is an old folk belief with no basis — human warts are caused by a virus, not by contact with toads. A toad's skin is dry and warty in texture, and that is probably where the idea came from. Toads do, however, secrete a genuinely toxic substance from the large parotoid glands behind their eyes and from smaller skin glands, so it is sensible to wash your hands after handling one and to avoid touching your eyes or mouth, and to keep toads away from pets that might bite them.
How do toads find their way back to the same pond every year?
Common toads are strongly faithful to the pond where they themselves developed, and each spring the adults migrate back to it, sometimes from a couple of kilometres away, moving on mild, wet nights. They appear to navigate using a combination of the earth's magnetic field, smell, and learned landmarks, and they follow traditional routes so consistently that the same crossing points are used year after year, decade after decade. This is also why a new road built across a migration route is so damaging — the toads keep using the route regardless.
What are "toad patrols"?
Where a toad migration route crosses a road, large numbers of slow-moving toads are crushed by traffic on peak nights. In Britain and parts of Europe, organised groups of volunteers ("toad patrols" or "toad crossings") go out on those nights with buckets and torches, collect the toads from the road, record the numbers, and carry them safely to the pond side. Some routes have permanent toad tunnels or temporary drift fencing installed. Registered crossings in the UK move hundreds of thousands of toads a year.
How is a toad different from a frog?
In everyday British and European usage, "toad" usually means the common toad and the natterjack, and "frog" means the common frog — and the differences are clear. The toad has dry, warty skin, short legs, crawls or makes short hops rather than long leaps, has a broad body and prominent parotoid glands, and lays its eggs in long strings wrapped around water plants, whereas the common frog has smooth moist skin, long legs, leaps, and lays eggs in a floating clump of spawn. Scientifically the split is fuzzier — "toad" is applied to warty-skinned members of several different families.