Buckets, torches and a great deal of patience, by Priya Padgett

An original contemporary online feature.

It is half past eight on a wet March evening, the temperature is seven degrees, and on a narrow lane outside the village of Brindley Moss, eleven adults in high-visibility jackets are walking very slowly, bent double, staring at the tarmac. Every few steps one of them stops, crouches and scoops something up in a gloved hand. Then they carry it, with enormous care, across the road.

They are the Hollins Lane Toad Patrol, and for six weeks every spring they do this every single night it rains.

The reason is simple and rather sad. Each year, as the ground warms, common toads leave the woods where they have spent the winter and set off for the pond where they were born, to breed. They follow the same route their ancestors followed, sometimes for more than a kilometre. Unfortunately, in the 1970s, somebody built a road across it. On a busy night before the patrol began, local people counted more than three hundred flattened toads along a single stretch of Hollins Lane.

Pauline Dobbins, who is seventy-three and has led the patrol for sixteen years, remembers that night. ‘It was like walking over a carpet of leaves,’ she says. ‘Except the leaves had been alive that morning.’ She bought a bucket and a torch the next day.

Since then, the patrol has grown to forty volunteers, working in shifts from dusk until the traffic stops, usually around eleven. They count and record every animal, male and female, alive and dead, and send their figures to a national survey of amphibians. Last spring they carried 4,212 toads across the lane. That is thousands of small journeys across one lane in six weeks, in the dark, in the rain.

It is not glamorous. Toads, it turns out, are not grateful. They wriggle. Some of the larger females arrive with a smaller male clinging to their backs, and the volunteers have learned to carry them as a pair, ‘like a piggyback’, says eleven-year-old volunteer Alfie, who has not missed a night this year. ‘I did my homework in the car,’ he admits. ‘Twice.’

Some volunteers drive forty minutes to be here. One man, a nurse, comes straight from a twelve-hour shift and stays until midnight. Pauline herself has been out on Easter Sunday, on her birthday and, memorably, on the night of her granddaughter’s wedding, still wearing her best shoes under her waterproof trousers. ‘The toads don’t know it’s a special occasion,’ she says, shrugging.

Their patience is quietly changing things. After years of letters from Pauline, the council has agreed to put up warning signs and to close the lane on the busiest nights. There is even talk of a tunnel under the road. Until then, the buckets stay by the gate.

Just before ten, a car rounds the bend and slows to a crawl, its headlights catching a dozen fluorescent jackets. The driver winds down her window. ‘Toads?’ she asks. Pauline nods. The driver switches off her engine and waits, while a small brown shape is lifted from in front of her wheel and carried to safety.

‘That’s four hundred and six tonight,’ calls a voice from the dark. Pauline smiles, pulls her hood tighter, and goes back to staring at the road.

The volunteers of the Hollins Lane Toad Patrol are described as remarkably dedicated. How does the writer try to show this?

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• what is said
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• other ways the writer tries to show that the volunteers are dedicated

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