The Welsh herpetologist Paul Gittins was profiled in the now-defunct Out Of Town magazine in August 1983, and he had some concerns about the effectiveness of campaigns to help toads across the roads, campaigns which he considered a distraction from the real issues:

All of which is one reason why [he] isn't that impressed by the preservationists who carry the creatures across the road in buckets -- particularly as these would-be do-gooders don't even bother to check which way the toads want to go... "This focus on road deaths", he maintains, "diverts interest from the destruction of breeding sites, the real danger to their future well-being."

Inspired by that article, I researched and wrote the song "The Toads and the Truck", a highly-selective history of the alterations which humans have caused to the landscape of Great Britain, as seen from the viewpoint of the toads sharing the land with them. It opens with these four lines:

Come sit for a while as a tale I unravel,
Concerning the toads that sit out on the gravel
Or concrete or asphalt where vehicles travel
And sometimes get struck by a lorry.

If you'd like to hear the whole song, there's a freely-downloadable .mp3 available here, on my web site. Be warned: I tend to write long songs when necessary, and the arrangement I recorded takes about 6 minutes.