Cane toads

This evening I have been out in my backyard catching cane toads to tastefully dispose of them. These creatures are not welcome in my yard. I try and maintain some sort of island home within my backyard for as much native fauna as possible. Cane toads are a definite threat to the viability of many native species and if they don't directly impact on native fauna they outcompete them for resources. As such I choose to collect cane toads from my back yard and dispose of them.

Some of you might ask how exactly I do this. Well it is a matter of me going around with a plastic bag (yes those yucky plastic bags) collecting the cane toads by hand and then placing them into the fridge or directly into the freezer for a hibernating type demise in my electrical appliance. Once these creatures are frozen I then just place them into my garbage bin.

Tonight I collected 4 cane toads with little effort. I'm sure there are probably a few more lurking in the dim corners of my yard, but the batteries in my torch weren't very powerful tonight, so only the obvious ones were collected. Off to the land of nod for these four at least.

If you're wondering, cane toads are an introduced pest to Queensland and Australia. They were purposefully introduced to Queensland as a biological control agent to control pests within cane fields. The problem for Australia was that we apparently offered a smorgasbord of target insects, etc for the cane toad and they rapidly bred and forgot about the insect they were suppose to prey upon in the canefields and now have taken up residence across most of Queensland, into the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales. The expansion of and the number of cane toads in Australia is likely to see them now as permanent residents, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and do our bit to minimise or stabilise the population of cane toads within our own areas (in my opinion anyway). Pin It