The valley is home to several other rare species, including the woodlark, northern harrier and the red-backed shrike, but it is the toad that has been adopted by environmentalists fighting to stop the 288km motorway from Bordeaux in the west to Lyon in the east, which is the most expensive ever built in France….
They have good reason to worry. The preservation of the tiny hermit beetle recently held up construction of the A28 motorway, near Angers in western France, for more than five years after activists argued that the road threatened its habitat. Only when the trunks of the trees in which they lived were successfully moved far from the site of the road could the motorway be completed.
If the legal fight to have the route of the A89 changed fails, the toad's usual tactic of rolling on to its back to show its poisonous belly is unlikely to stop the bulldozers.
"The toad's only defence is to play dead by lying on its back and showing its coloured stomach, which contains irritant products," said one French naturalist. "In the animal world, a yellow stomach is a sign which never lies: if you bite, you are going to get a nasty surprise. There might occasionally be one bite, but never two."
You know, here in the states, “yellow-bellied” means something totally different. But I can understand the laying down on its back when threatened.
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