A muggy and often wet late summer had given way to a crisp and sunlit autumn morning. Hawthorns were thick with fruit, the best crop for a few years, the bracken was coppery against the blue sky, and on Big Moor red deer stags were edging round a harem of hinds. They weren’t bellowing quite yet, but the rut was only days away. This, for me, is the best time of year in north‑east Derbyshire, the gritstone cool and rough to the touch, the world somehow better defined.
My reverie was sharply interrupted with a warning to watch where I was treading. I stopped. My companion told me I’d almost stepped in it – “it” being a brown splodge adjacent to my boot that I assumed was canine in origin.
Closer inspection revealed it to be a common toad. It sat there, unmoving, with that phlegmatic expression toads have, mouth downturned, as though it had the measure of things but would carry on anyway. Its stillness was something of a puzzle to me. Or should I say her stillness, because the female is larger, and this toad was huge, the biggest I’d seen in a while.
Common toads are not as common as they once were, due in part to their forgivable habit of crossing busy roads each spring to reach their breeding ponds. Toads are also susceptible to new pathogens, including the chytrid fungus that has spread from imported species. This one didn’t look sick, just wearied. Perhaps the cold start to the day and the lengthening nights had caused it to pause in the sunshine before returning to its shelter in the heather and dense grasses nearby.
I took in the lumpy, papery skin, the parotoid glands on its broad head that excrete toxin to ward off predators, and looked into its orange-gold iris, which George Orwell praised as “the most beautiful eye of any living creature”. Orwell was sometimes harangued for writing about nature on the basis that it was a bourgeois thing to do. But meeting a toad eye to eye can teach us something of the state we’re in.
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