THE TOAD AND ITS PREY.

Auckland Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 273, 19 November 1887, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE TOAD AND ITS PREY.

Tho Wonderful Capacity for Swallowing Possessed by tho Nolsomo Reptile.

The accuracy of aim. in the young toad is similar to the accuracy with which the young quail or chicken picks up a grain. A young chicken, having only its head out of the shell, picked up a fly that, lighted near it. And said Mr Calthrop, wTieri you consider the nice co-operation of norvons and muscular movements necessary to this feat, you will perceive that the chicken must have been practising fly-catching in the person of its ancestry for thousands or millions of years. But I once had curious proof that the toad is capable of improvement by practice. Under a beehive I observed for several successive summers a toad watching for overloaded bees who failed to reach the threshold of the hive. No sooner did they fall on the ground than he snapped them up. But one day I saw that he had lost by some accident his right eye, and when he struck at a bee he lost his aim, and picked up dirt from one side of the bee. He wiped his mouth with his forepaw and tried again and again- The bee generally managed to climb to the top of some little prominence on the ground and fly away before the toad succeeded. The poor fellow was half starved and grew thin, but I observed before the summer was ended he had learned to aim as correctly with one eye as he used to with two, and had again recovered his plumpness.