THE TOAD AND ITS PREY. The Wonderful Capacity for Swallowing Possessed by the Noisome Reptile.
Tiirc accuracy of aim in the young toad is similar to the accui'acy "with which the young- quail or chicken picks up a grain. A young chicken, having only its head out of the .shell, picked up a fly that lighted near it. And said Mr Calthrop, when you consider the nice co-operation of nenous and muscular movements necessary to this feat, you will perceive that the chicken must have been practicing fly-catching in the person of its ancestry for thousands or millions of years. But I once had curious proof that the toad is capable of improvement by practice. Under a beehive I obsers*ed for several successive summers a toad watching for overloaded bees who failed to reach the threshold of the hive. No sooner did they fall on the ground than he snapped them up. But one day I saw that he had lost by some accident his right eye, and when he struck at a bee he lost his aim, and picked up dirt from one side of the bee. He wiped his mouth with his forepaw and tried again and again. The bee genei'ally managed to climb to the top of some little prominence on the ground and fly away before the toad succeeded. The poor fellow was half starved and grew thin, but I observed before the summer was ended he had learned to aim as correctly with one eye as he used to with two, and had again recovered his plumpness.
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Te Aroha News, 26 November 1887, Page 3
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262THE TOAD AND ITS PREY. The Wonderful Capacity for Swallowing Possessed by the Noisome Reptile. Te Aroha News, 26 November 1887, Page 3
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