Brown, bumpy toads
Toads and frogs, along with many other critters, inhabit our ponds. We have built a backyard resort for critters and we wonder why they arrive in huge numbers and serenade us nightly with their glorious love songs. Our new backyard dwellers eat mosquitoes, thousands of them daily, and therefore make our lives more pleasant. They also eat garden pests, flies, and other creepy, crawly things that most of us humans find more than a little unpleasant.

Just so you can tell which critters have arrived at the resort in your yard, toads are usually brown and bumpy and sound like an electric motor about to burn out.

You probably have toads in your backyard. Normally they are the first to arrive at a new pond after dragonflies and butterflies. Toads need water to breed and you have thoughtfully provided it. The sounds you hear nightly are toads calling for mates. The results of those calls can be seen in your pond the next morning, usually with the toads, one on top of the other, leaving long jelly like strands of eggs that will soon hatch into thousands of tadpoles. Toad tadpoles hatch in just a few days and turn into tiny toads in a few days more. Don't worry, they don't all survive. Good thing, because we would soon be up to our ears in toads. The toad eggs will not harm your fish. Your fish will not eat them. They are covered in a toxic substance that your fish don't like. Toads leave the water after breeding and will live in dark, moist places in your garden happily snatching flies. I often leave spaces between rocks so my resident toads can be happy and eat more mosquitoes.