Frogs and Toads

Overview

Frogs and toads live wherever there is fresh water to breed in. Their spring chorus from the ditches and fens is the sound that tells a basin village the floodwater has fallen back and the fields can be worked. Frogs are food for herons, storks, snakes, and the poor; toads carry a mild poison in their skin and an uneasy place in tales.

Appearance

A frog is about the size of a palm, smooth-skinned and moist, olive-green to brown with dark blotches and a dark patch behind each eye. It has long, strong hind legs, webbed feet, and golden eyes. It leaps.

A toad is squatter and heavier, with dry, warty, earth-brown skin, a large swelling behind each eye, short legs, and copper-coloured eyes with horizontal pupils. It walks or makes short hops.

On spring nights frogs croak in a purring, grunting chorus that fills a fen, and toads call with a high, quiet trill. A toad handled roughly sweats a white milky fluid from its skin that burns the eyes and mouth.

Habitat and Range

Frogs and toads live throughout the wetter country of both sides of Caeldon: the ditches, ponds, and fens of the Confluence Basins and the Lower Serath. They live as well in the side channels of the Greyford Reach, the cisterns and garden ponds of the Leeward Folds, and every village pond. Toads range further from water than frogs and come back to the same ponds every spring.

Behaviour and Temperament

Frogs and toads eat insects, slugs, worms, and spiders, catching them with a quick flick of a sticky tongue. Frogs keep near water; toads wander gardens and cellars at night. Both sleep through the winter in mud, under stones, or in the bottom of ponds, and come out together in a few warm nights of spring.

Life Cycle

Frogs lay clumps of spawn, toads long strings, in shallow water in spring. Tadpoles hatch, grow legs, lose their tails, and leave the water as tiny froglets in early summer, in such numbers that the paths are covered. Most are eaten. A toad may live ten years.

Uses and Dangers

Frogs' legs are eaten in the Basins and the corridor towns, and frogs feed the poor in the low months. Toads eat garden pests. The toad's skin poison is mild; it sickens a dog that mouths one and is used by some healers, in small amounts, against fevers.

Lore and Belief

The first frog chorus of spring is the sign basin villages wait for: when the frogs sing in the ditches, the rise has fallen back. A frog in the well is good luck; a toad in the house is ill. Basin tales give toads to witches as their creatures and say a toad carries a jewel in its head, which it does not; a witch's toad of the tales, if it is anything, is a familiar, and no toad.

Where It Appears

• Writers' Guide: The Basins and the Marches