The City of Toadly Love
On a warm, rainy night every spring, the toads of Roxborough, Pa., go looking for love. Sadly, the leaping lovers must cross busy roads in the Philadelphia suburb to travel from the woods around the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education to their annual dive into Roxborough Reservoir, and many of them perish beneath the wheels of passing vehicles, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer-Daily News. In response to a campaign by local animal activist Lisa Levinson, the Philadelphia Streets Department issued a permit to close the streets when the toads made their migration this year, which began with a squirmy trickle around March 27 and culminated with the mass migration of between 700 and 1,000 toads on April 6. “In an hour or so we had about 250 toads crossing,” Levinson says.
