Horney Toads

When I first moved to Texas and had begun to replenish my collection of Bonsai trees, I started noticing lizards that would crawl up the branches of my larger trees and camp in the hollows of their trunks. To an inexperienced gardener the response may have been “ what are you doing?! Get off my tree! Shoo, shoo!” However, to a hardened Bonsai enthusiast of four years of experience, the lizards were a joyous sight and for some time my desktop was decorated by images like the following:

I have come to learn, as of late, that my shy little friends were, what is commonly known as, “horney toads.” This fact, unfortunately, I have learned too late. Within the six years I have been in Texas I have, each year, seen progressively less of these beautiful creatures and, at the present time, there are no known horney toads calling my trees home. They say the disappearance is because of the rise in fire ants but that doesn’t negate the fact that many people would kill a lizard on site. When the horney toads were around my plants had almost no pest problems at all, but lately, because the lizards are not there to eat them, red spider mites, scale and other heinous insects have begun infecting a good portion of my stock. I feel like Michael Pollan when I say that I wish people had taken time to understand them before killing all of my lizard friends. He struggles with the ideas of weeds, plants that are perceived to be grotesque and, in a way, must be controlled yet can also be beautiful at times. The horney toad population was a population of unsuspecting, local fauna that has been annihilated by the invading weeds of suburbia and humanity. It’s not that suburbia or humanity are bad things, on the contrary they can be quite pleasing, but they must be thought about and contemplated.

Now that my natural pest control friends have all died off, I go through Safer pesticide/fungicide spray like Grant went through Vicksburg. Safer is an amazing product, and I have been using it since I first started Bonsai in Ohio, before it was sold at major chains like Lowes and Home Depot. It’s a delicate spray in that its only ever intended to be used for vegetables, rose bushes and the like. Safer is also organic and supposedly not that bad for the environment. However, Safer costs around $7 a bottle; the lizards were free. All I had to do was supply the bugs. Safer also is said kill mycorrhizae in the soil (a fungus beneficial to the breakdown of organic matter by roots); lizards at most would only fertilize the soil with their droppings.

Horney toads may be gone already, so there’s no use complaining, but I will sincerely miss my friends. If only people had given them a chance to explain themselves before deciding they were a pest in need-of-eradication.