I saw quite a sight today on the way home. I was cycling up towards the Davis bike overpass, through a little stretch of land absolutely teeming with life – mostly little furry critters which are either gophers or chipmunks (hey I’m not David Attenborogh, I’m not even David Bellamy), but also hares and colourful birds, and I even encountered a snake there once. Anyway I was mumbling nonsensical lyrics to Like A Rolling Stone to myself, when I heard one of the critters squealing. I looked to my left and saw this enormous bird of prey, possibly an eagle (I didn’t happen to have my Audubon field guide on me), lifting this little furry guy from the ground and into the air. It was at once so quick and so slow, like a scene from a Vietnam newsreel of a stranded soldier being airlifted from the jungle. “Cor,” said the hidden Aussie inside me, “it’s nature’s way!” You don’t see that in Burnt Oak, the North Londoner inside me replied, while trying to think of an appropriate joke about Burnt Oak birds.

Davis has some wildlife alright, not least the bright blue birds that look so pretty but wake me up in the morning, and the ducks that strut about the UC campus like Oxford dons, but perhaps its most well-known (and loved) residents are the toads. Most of them reside in a clump of marshland and a scruffy pond to the east of the downtown, and you can hear them singing their little choruses outside local German brewpub Sudwerk of an evening (and who can blame them, at a dollar a beer). But they aren’t famous for that, oh no. Several years ago, when the city erected an overpass to cross the freeway, they had to build right through the middle of the toads’ home. Now Davis residents are famous for not wanting ugly development in their back yard, but the toads just dealt with it like, well, do you remember that game ‘Frogger’?

To avoid mass squashage, the Davisites decided to spend their dollars on a nice tunnel for the poor toads, beneath the road. Nobody told the toads what it was for, however, and they eyed it suspiciously. “Could be snakes in there,” they croaked. “I’ll take my chances on the road.” So to show the toads that the tunnel was safe and serpent-free, lights were installed. “Great!” thought the toads, and all was well until some unlucky sods burnt to death under the heat of the tunnel’s lamps. And then there was the problem of those great big birds swooping down from the sky looking for an easy dinner: they soon wised up to the fact that there was a convenient little hole in the ground that regularly produced pre-cooked meals, albeit a little warty.

This became a big story; even the Daily Show picked up on it, and the Davis toad tunnel became national news, and a bit of a joke. A local author even published a children’s book about the toads (advertised as “a book that will ‘ribbit’ you in your chair”). So the people of Davis, far from disspirited by the toads’ lack of enthusiasm for their tunnel, decided to add to the eccentricity of the project by disguising the tunnel’s entrances with little toad-town buildings, such as a post-office. Now the toads (or even the frogs, they don’t discriminate) can send postcards to all their little toady friends around the world, telling everyone that the humans in their town mean well, but are completely bloody bonkers.