Wildlife Watching Wednesday: American Toads in the Garden

By: Tom Berg

The American toad lives throughout most of the eastern and northeastern United States. In fact, they are the most widespread toad species in all of North America. This common amphibian is a frequent visitor to flower gardens, vegetable gardens, and other moist areas where insects abound. Backyard habitats are great for toads. They can also be found in parks, forests and grasslands.

The American toad is relatively small (2-4 inches long), and is usually a mottled brown or brownish-gray color. Toads are covered with small warts, and the warts can be colored brown, red, orange or yellow. Humans cannot get warts from handling them, though. Toads are short and stout, and are fairly slow-moving since they cannot hop very far or very fast.

Besides mosquitoes, ants, aphids, and other insect pests, toads also eat worms, slugs, spiders, and almost anything else they can fit in their mouths. They are carnivorous predators. They can eat thousands of bugs in one season, so most gardeners are happy to have them living nearby.

An interesting fact about these creatures is that American toads (and their tadpoles) generate toxic chemicals from glands in their skin to discourage predators from eating them. Although the poison may only be a skin irritant to humans, it can be dangerous to pets like dogs and cats if they eat it or if it gets in their eyes. Most wild animals, including fish, avoid eating toads and their tadpoles.

One group of creatures that specialize in eating toads, however, are snakes. Eastern hognose snakes, in particular, love to eat toads. They are immune to the toad’s poison, so they hunt them as often as they can. The common garter snake is another toad predator, since it is also immune to the toad’s poison.

One of the American toad’s defenses against a snake attack is to urinate on themselves to discourage the snake from swallowing them. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t!

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