Friday night in Bulman is toad muster night. At dusk, everybody meets up at the Gulin Gulin General Store, slides on a pair of blue surgical gloves and slpits up into groups with 5-gallon white buckets and oversized flashlights.
A brief history lesson may be necessary to help explain this unique social behavior…
Cane toads were introduced to Australia in efforts to keep the cane crop free of pests, but the plan backfired when these poisonous toads began to proliferate by the thousands. The Beswick community is now trying to collect as many toads as possible to freeze and kill them so they won’t keep killing the bush animals the people rely on for hunting.
Apparently I missed the lesson on how to muster up these little guys up because the kids were scooping them up by the hind leg one after another. I’m thinking, these guys are huge. How on earth can I not manage to spot one of these beasts. They’re at least the size of my hand. No joke. As I wandered up and down the roads looking for my first victim, I passed another team who had already to muster up 16 of these fellas. I was getting a bit frustrated when I turned my headlamp to the field on my right and there he was. King of the cowpie. I snatched him up by his hind leg and proudly ran him over to add him to the pail. Chelsea documented my efforts.
After about an hour of wandering around in the dark catching mutantly large toads, the town gathered to announce the winners. The competition had reached its 4th week and it was time to tally up. All in all, 1,177 toads were captured & sentenced to death. Victory, indeed!
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The time had come for us to attempt to head back to Darwin. If you followed my last two blogs, you know we had a tough time crossing the Mighty Mainoru River, so we knew we could run into the same dilemma trying to cross again. This time, though, we were not able to find anyone to tow us. The river was at least an hour and a half from town, so I can understand why we didn’t find any volunteers to help us. We got to the river crossing and sure enough, it was too deep for our troopie to drive across without flooding the engine. We had two options. We could either wait until someone came along in a truck with a hitch, or obviously, we could build our own snorkel out of an old rusty muffler that Ben had found near the riverbank. As any world race team would do, we chose option #2. We used an empty plastic soda bottle to funnel the air intake into the old rusty muffler and secured it to the luggage rack with some rope we found in the troopie. It wasn’t exactly a pretty sight, and I have to admit, I was a little reluctant at first, but with a little faith and a lot of laughs, we pulled it off.
After one of the craziest adventures I’d ever been on, we finally made it back to Darwin in one piece where our team was awarded the first annual MacGuyver Award for our creative efforts.
