Beware of the Llama

Apropos Bolivian road signs warning drivers that an alpaca or llama might leap across the path at any moment, I was cycling in Norfolk last weekend, and passed a road sign warning of toads.

This wasn't one of those signs put up by local residents doing their bit to protect their cuddly indigenous or endemic local fauna. ("Mind our ducks" - usually in Oxfordshire). This was a proper triangular warning sign between Aylsham and Cawston. Clearly, someone in the council highways department had taken the trouble to get the artwork right. This was no vague representation of an indeterminate amphibian.

It was clearly a toad, a toad that any self-respecting witch would have been happy to call a familiar.

I didn't see any live ones in the danger zone (or even road-killed either), though there were a couple of squashed partridges, a squirrel and another rodent in fairly quick succession.

There's a distinction to be made here - those creatures which might cause a serious accident (deer, horses) which drivers need to be warned about, and those which motorists might choose to be merciful to.

Latin America has started to do this too. I'm sure I've seen an armadillo-warning sign near Punta Tombo in Argentina; and in Belize and Cuba, land-crab alerts.

Two years ago, near Trinidad in southern Cuba, tour leader Rose Latham cautiously warned the Tocororo group that our bus taking the coast road would mean mean squashing dozens of crabs (they cross the road in their hundreds); whilst retracing our steps on the inland road would be a much longer drive. The group consensus was "Sod the crabs".

And in Panama -note that road signs are in two languages, since 100 years of Canal Zone influence means that many Panamanians are bilingual - iguanas get their own (zebra?) crossing.