Gilbette Blais found something unexpected floating in her toilet Saturday morning – a toad.
At about 10 a.m., she walked into the bathroom of her Beach Road apartment and lifted the lid of the toilet. What she first thought was a “deposit” blinked at her, she said.
“I noticed it right away. It was this toad, just floating in the water.”
It was clinging to the side of the bowl a bit, half out of the water, the way toads “hang out at the edge of a pond,” she said.
The toad, about five inches long and “dark green and warty, with a little stripe down its back,” seemed content. “It looked happy and totally healthy. It did not look like a toilet toad,” she said. “Its eyes were bright.”
Blais’ 14-year-old son Terran had used the bathroom less than a half hour before she entered and had flushed the toilet and closed the lid. “So it (the toad) had definitely come up (the plumbing),” she said.
The apartment building experienced a sewage back-up earlier in the spring, but whether there’s a connection to the toad is difficult to say. The building’s sewer line has insufficient grade and, without jetting, backs up, said apartment owner Dick Flegel.
“I don’t know if it has anything to do with toads, but it does have something to do with turds,” Flegel joked. It’s the first time a toad has been found in one of his toilets, he said.
Water and sewer operator Scott Bradford said he’s seen mangled toads come through sewer lines to arrive at the sewage treatment plant. A toad could access the system through a storm sewer grate or a temporarily uncapped connection, he said. “There’s a lot of things that come through that you wouldn’t expect.”
Based on her research online, Blais believes the toad was a full-sized, adult Western toad (Bufo boreas), which are common around Haines. She learned that the species migrates to “optimal bodies of water” for breeding and noted that she had just cleaned the bowl the previous day. She released the toad next to a stream outside her apartment.
“I have definitely looked in the bowl a few times since,” she said.