Surely toads live near water? That’s a given, right?

So what are they doing at the top of an arid hill with no obvious ponds at any time of year, let alone in the heat of the Portuguese summer?

The sudden appearance of a toad calmly sitting in the cats drinking water has been an intermittent problem (for my cats) since I first moved to Portugal some 25 years ago. The big beautiful cat we brought with us then used to communicate the problem by staring at me pointedly then looking at his water bowl, back to me, back to his water bowl, until I realised his water looked odd!

We got used to the little and large odd couple of toads that used to come in through the big wooden door, one through the cat flap, the other half her size slipping underneath, I always assumed this was a male and female though spiny toads don’t seem to have such a huge sexual dimorphism as this odd couple, where the male was half the size of the female. These visits were amusing, for us at least, but my first encounter with a toad left me gasping in shock. I was peacefully propping up little pea plants with sticks, and as I carried along the row found a pea stick resisted going very deep into the ground, so I twisted it in with a little more force, when to my shock and horror the very soil came alive – it seemed – and exploded into my face, and an enormous and presumably irritated at being poked – toad – had enough and leapt out of its burrow.

The ‘mud’ in the water bowl in the morning was a clue that the toads were back and having a nocturnal soak again. My latest feral cat adoptee finds them interesting and still drinks the water, and she sometimes follows them when they wander off for a nightly hunt amongst the recycling store.