THE TOADS “TOMB”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 219, 15 September 1928, Page 8

THE TOADS “TOMB”

SOME DISCOVERIES EXPLAINED The toad is shy and retiring for the greater part of the year. He hides all day in some hole which w T e may call his den, for it is his home to which he returns each morning after the night’s hunting is over. This retreat may be down a mouse hole at the edge of a ditch, under a cabbage plant in the garden, beneath a stone in the rockery, or down a crevice behind your doorstep. As long as he can find a nice damp and really private hole he does not mind where it is. It is this habit, that accounts for toads being found in strange places, and for accounts given in all good faith of ones which arc supposed to have been found in the solid rock or inside a growing tree.

Of course, not even a toad could live many hours entombed in solid rock without air, food, or light, let alone the thousands of years that it is sometimes claimed it must have been buried (writes Francis Pitt in Wild Creatures of Garden and Hedgerow”). The explanation is quite simple. What happened is that a toad in search of a good home finds a crack leading into the rock, which being cool and damp suits him exactly, so therein he makes himself at home, living very happily until a time comes when the stone is to be quarried away. The quarrymen having attacked it, the rock comes tumbling down, when among the bits someone chances to spy the toad. Nobody saw the crack, all see the toad, which was entombed in solid rock, or at least that is what they say, and so a marvellous tale is told of how the creature must have lived there without air, food, or water for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.