I’ve been recording the voices of a lot of big, dramatic, eye-and-ear-catching creatures lately — cranes, geese, swans. But on one recent night, when I wandered down to the water’s edge in the darkness, someone a bit more mysterious and shy was making itself heard. Tentatively.
At first, I pointed the microphone up, trying to locate it. There are so many returning birds right now, I thought this was one I hadn’t yet heard. But I quickly realized the source of the sound was at my feet, hanging out in the liminal zone between water and land — an amphibian. As you’ll hear in the recording, my first guess was that it was a frog, but now I’m pretty sure it was Bufo bufo, the common toad. I find its little chirps adorable. I hope you do, too, and even moreso, I hope there were some ladytoads within listening range, drawn to this fellow’s siren song.1
I’m currently in London, attending the MOTH Festival of Ideas — a gathering of people working at the leading edge of research and thought about human relationships with more-than-human beings and entities (that’s what the MOTH stands for in the name, more than human). It’s been fascinating so far, with lots of people sharing boundary-expanding research and ideas. Just one quick example: last night, economist Kate Raworth turned the audience into a pop-up circus that reinvented the global financial system to benefit nature.
One of the things I am loving about this gathering is that among all the heady talk about things like expanding rights to more-than-human entities and restructuring institutions in less human-centric ways, people are also sharing emotions and experience of connection to plants, animals, fungi, and places. I’ve wiped away some tears, laughed out loud several times, and taken some sharp in-breaths of wonder. This is a very thinky space, but not only that. There’s room for feeling, too. Including the simple delight of meeting a toad.
George Orwell wrote a beautiful little essay in defense of this same delight, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are two especially resonant excerpts:
I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of Spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets.
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The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
George Orwell. First published in Tribune, 12 April 1946. From the Complete Works, XVIII, 2970, p. 238.
Some delightful toad pictures and information can be found at the Woodland Trust website, among many other places.
