Toad Hunting

Common toads mating

I was walking down to our pond when I heard a matting call of a common toad , that's when I had the idea to go to a lake next our village, . I wanted to record how they mate and how their toad spawn looked I knew a great place where toads gather in the spring to mate. I set off with my bike and finally got there after about 20 minutes and I was really, really tired so I sat  down for a little bit and then I went to find some toads. I could hear their mating calls so I knew they were there.  It only took me about 1 minute to find a toad it was swimming in the water looking for a mate. As soon as it saw me it tried to dive down into the water but it was too slow so I managed to catch it. It started to croak its alarming call and all of a sudden all the toad croaks stopped.  I was panicking for a bit because I  thought they had probably gone underwater to hide, but after 10 seconds they started to croak again :) I filmed the toad for a while then I let it go.  Whilst I was letting it go I realized that there was loads and loads of frog spawn on the dry mud which means the water level must have dropped. So I started to put the frog spawn back into the water, then I went back to catching toads. I could see hundreds of toads but lots of them were very far away in the water. The next toads I saw were mating, I picked them up and they were stuck to each other like glue. I filmed them a little bit too and then let them go in the water. I saw another toad about 1 meter away from me and I thought  to myself, "I must get it!" . I've been here before so I already knew a couple of tricks of how to get a toad far away from you.  This trick has worked on all the toads I caught on this trip, but this only works in mating season '-  here is what you need to do! First put your hand in the water, it doesn't matter if the toad isn't watching your hand, after you have put your hand in the water start shaking it and the toad will swim as fast as it can to try and grab on to it and  will try to mate your hand LOL. The toad thinks that your shaking hand is a female toad splashing around in the water. Here is a video of me shaking my hand and the toad coming to grab it. It took me about a hour to get home because I was very tired. The next day I went again to find a female so I could bring it back to the pond to that they could mate.