Not only are they harmless - they eat lots of fleas at that size and when get bigger take on the palmetto bugs, slugs, catapillers, snails, mosquitoes etc, etc.

They are the bug hunters in the garden. Let them work for you. Need to be organic, are sensitive fellows to chemicals but take over the chems job quite well.

And so cute when they all sing in the water garden. They are singing tonight. Breed, Breed, Breed. They can set up a great harmony. Particularily before a rain storm. Weather forcasters too. Handy critters.

Your dogs will put them in their mouth once and then no more. Secrete a distasteful ooze for dogs.

If they were born in your pond and yard will stay there.

We have the Eastern spadefoot toad and the Western Ridgeback which seem to come in drought years and are too noisy for me. At least i think those are their names from my memory.

Say nice things to them, they are our amphibian garden friends. They seem to get used to you if you do that.

Sandy

I am excited to see quite a few toads this year --- I always have water frogs because of my large pond, but the toads have been absent for a few years.

Some frogs will eat toads. We accidentally got bullfrogs, or some kind of large frogs in our water garden, and our toad population plummeted. We had to drain our pond at one point to try to find a leak, and while we were at it we caught the frogs and relocated them to a nearby natural pond. Our toad population has recovered nicely. I love those itty bitty little toadlettes (as we call them). Our biggest concern is the lawn mower. I'm sure we lose some when we mow the grass, but we haven't figured out a way to solve that problem. ... And no, DH doesn't want to get rid of all the grass. We've gotten rid of about 60% to 70% of it. The rest is for the critters like the toads.

Sally

I am so proud of my baby toads. We have a small garden pond and a couple toads laid their eggs and we had a whole lot of tadpoles that one day just disappeared, but I saw the little toads hopping around. I figured they must have hopped out overnight so predators couldn't see them. I think some of them probably got eaten by birds the next day, but some made it. The goldfish in the pond didn't even bother the tadpoles when they were really little. I feel like a proud toad mama after seeing those little toads hopping around in my garden!

We have them too, but we don't have a pond and there are no other water sources, except for bird baths, in the area. I wonder where they laid their eggs.

My toads burrow in the ground, and I always assumed this is where they lay their eggs. This brings up a whole new question - where DO toads "propagate"?

I love the little toads that I find. They're rarer for me since I don't have a pond though. It's all this rain, they just think my backyard is a pond.

It could be rio grande chirping frogs. They do not need water for their eggs, as they lay them in moist soil.

Toads are valued members of this garden. My wife was walking about the garden one day and saw a snake back half exposed while the front half was inside a hiding spot that toads gather in. She ran to get a shovel, returned, and began beating the back half. The snake backed out, and regurgitated a throat-deep toad that had just been swallowed. She watched as the toad slowly came out and then hopped away. The snake then got what was coming to it, not what it was coming for. Attagirl!