birding-aus

Roufous Night Heron dismembering Cane Toads.

To: Tom Tarrant <>
Subject: Roufous Night Heron dismembering Cane Toads.
From: Carl Clifford <>
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 17:02:11 +1100
Tom,

I saw that episode. The transcript is as follows:

" At a pond in Hamburg, in 2005, toads started exploding during the mating season. Thousands of toads, swollen to three times their usual size, crawled out of the water, making eerie screeching noises, and went pop. Toad entrails were propelled up to a yard away.

The authorities feared toxic pollution, or a new “bird flu” style health emergency, but when the “pond of death” was pumped into tankers and analysed at laboratories, no clue was found. Exploding toads were subsequently reported at other sites in Germany and Denmark.

One theory is that the pond was infected by a fungus or virus, brought in by nearby racehorses. Another is that birds peck the livers from living toads; the toads then puff up, which is their natural defence mechanism against predator attack, and water enters the cavity in their body through the wound, and thus they keep inflating until they pop. (Two years previously, crowds of Hamburg crows had taken to attacking humans en masse, without warning, in a local park.) "


Cheers,

Carl Clifford


On 01/02/2012, at 4:45 PM, Tom Tarrant wrote:

Did anyone see an episode of QI shown a couple of weeks back? Stephen Fry mentioned that there was a story of 'exploding' Common Toads (Bufo bufo?) in the UK, at the time no-one knew the cause but it turned out that crows had been doing something similar and 'extracting' their organs and in doing so they had induced the amphibians to inflate themselves and explode! (well
I think that's how the story went:-))

Tom

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Del Richards
<>wrote:

  Over some years I have had a programme "Bird Talk Back" on ABC Far
North in Cairns. Yesterday (31/01/2012) I fielded ten calls in thirty
minutes.
  Early in the programme a caller from Walkamin (between Mareeba and
Atherton) had found four dead cane toads with an small incision in their
throat by her small backyard pond.
I told her plainly that it was a good mystery thinking that it would be animal attack rather than bird predation. About three calls later a gent from Gordonvale south of Cairns assured us that he had watched White- tailed Rats and (surprise, surprise!) Northern Brown Bandicoots kill and eat the
non-toxic underside parts of cane toads.
Minutes later the mystery was solved when George who owned a piggery at Walkamin called in to tell us about Roufous Night Herons. He related that after an early evening storm one time he checked the piggery and that a night heron was moving through the pig pens and systematically flipping
cane toads on their back and taking out their innards.
  Given the shape and dexterity of their pointed bill the night heron
would be well able to extract the gut through a small incision. On my next programme I will endeavour to follow the thread on birds and cane toads in an effort to derive some more latent information that is held out there by
everyday non-scientific observers.

Del. Richards, Fine Feather Tours, Mossman, NQ.
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Tom Tarrant
Kobble Creek, Qld

http://kobble.aviceda.org

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