Almost Paradise

The other weekend we had a party. Folks were having a good time. Then Tommy ran up to me, all excited. “Mom needs you out in the yard,” he blurted out. Oh? I headed to the kitchen. “What’s wrong, hon?” I called through the window above the sink. Judy looked up at me from the main turtle pen, squinting in the sunlight.

“There’s a bufo,” she said, the disgust unmistakable in her voice.

Uh oh. It was Toad Patrol time.

Bufos, a.k.a. Bufo marinus, a.k.a. cane toads, have been in the Hawaiian Islands since the 1930s. The sugar planters brought them here from Central America because they were supposed to be good at eating insect pests in sugarcane fields (thus their name). I don’t know about that, but I do know that they’re big and ugly and poisonous. They breed like crazy. And they have no natural predators because they secrete a nasty toxin from their skin when they’re stressed, such as when a dog tries to bite one. The toxin can be fatal to the dog. I don’t imagine that the bufo enjoys the bite much either.

We occasionally find bufos in our yard, probably because they’re drawn to the water dishes that we leave for the turtles in their pens. Bufos are land toads but they still do enjoy an occasional soak. From time to time, Judy will be changing the turtles’ water and get startled by a bufo sitting in the water dish. We don’t want ‘em in our yard, mostly because of the danger to our dogs if they were to try to bite one.

But bufos aren’t just poisonous and ugly, they’re also predators in their own right. Peanut, one of the two baby three-toed box turtles that hatched from Molly’s eggs in 2003, mysteriously disappeared in 2005 — and Judy suspects that a bufo might have gotten in and eaten her. A bufo will eat anything it can get into its mouth, and back then it’s possible that Peanut was small enough that a large bufo could have done it. Understandably, Judy hates the things.

We have developed a routine — Toad Patrol — for what to do when a bufo appears in the yard. I’ll grab the bufo (Judy refuses to touch them), plop it into a 5-gallon bucket, take it to the storm drain catch basin inlet across the street from our house, and toss the bufo down into the catch basin. That way, I can get the toad out of our yard, and not worry about it immediately returning, without having to actually kill it.

So I went and got my bucket, and after a bit of poking and prodding through the turtles’ hibiscus bushes managed to get the bufo into an open spot where I could grab it. This one was big, probably 6 inches from its snout to its rear, and at least a pound. Usually I will grab a bufo behind its big head, around its shoulders and ribs — but this one was so big and fat that I didn’t think I could get a good grip there. Instead, I grabbed it by the thigh of one of its hind legs. It struggled, its skin all cool and dry and warty, but I kept my grip, hauled it up and out, and put it into the bucket.

It tried to climb the side of the bucket, and you could see that even though it looked big and fat from side to side, it was actually quite flat from top to bottom. It had long, strong legs; it could easily jump and knock the bucket over if I wasn’t paying attention.

The kids were fascinated. Erin thought it was gross but couldn’t stay away.

I carried the bucket to the storm drain catch basin, tilted it, and quickly slung the bufo into the inlet slot before it could jump free. The kids clustered to peer in through the slot…

…and through the hole in the manhole cover above.

“There it is!” shouted Tommy, peering in through the manhole cover hole.

I tried looking through the inlet slot, too, but couldn’t get a good angle to see it with my own eyes. So instead I stuck in my arm, camera in hand, and was able to locate the bufo by seeing its image on the camera’s LCD screen.

The catch basin has a gently sloping shallow section where rainwater first enters, and then a deeper section where a drain conduit carries rainwater away underground, eventually to discharge into Kalihi Stream half a mile away. The toad had landed in the shallow section, and since it didn’t know that the scary dark pipe at the bottom of the hole led to a nice wet stream, it was reluctant to jump down to the deeper section.

After several minutes, possibly because it was annoyed, it turned tail and hopped away from my camera.

I hadn’t thought it, but it looked like the bufo might possibly actually get out, at the far end of the shallow section of the catch basin. “Well,” I thought, “if it can, then it deserves to get out. And if not, it can always go down the pipe and get back to the stream.”

And with that, we left the bufo to its own devices and returned to our party.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.