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Along a stretch of Vancouver Island highway, a huge mass of tiny amphibians want to cross the road.

But the quarter-sized toadlets don't necessarily have the right of way - and that's proving to be a problem.

About one million recently hatched tadpoles have evolved and made their way up from local wetlands to the Inland Island Highway, a four-lane freeway between Campbell River and Courtenay, B.C.

Ignoring the timely and useful advice of looking both ways before crossing the road, the toadlets are so eager to cross the highway that they aren't particularly careful.

As a result, the creatures face a tragic end and the highway gets a slippery and slick new sheen.

When the same problem arose several years ago, mitigation fencing was installed to guide the toads under the highway and across to the west side.

However, this year the toads won't have any of it, wanting to master a real-life game of Frogger all on their own.

"It seems the population has just spiked, and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of them and they still seem to prefer the road to the culverts," said Sue Pauwels, area manager with the Ministry of Transportation.

And so, employees with the ministry and several dozen environmental consultants have been put to work.

A 45-centimetre-high plastic fence has been erected along the highway with a bucket, or "pit trap" dug into the ground every 15 metres.

As the toads attempt to make their way across the road, many are foiled and plunge into the deep pails.

Once full - the pails can carry about one thousand of the little creatures - the buckets are hauled across the road by the people on toad duty.

For the first few weeks of this mission, the ministry shut down the northbound lane of the highway to ensure the workers could make it across safely with their precious loads of toads.

At the height of the toad madness several weeks ago, about 30 people were escorting the creatures across the road.

Now that the toad numbers are declining, about six people remain.

The toadlets range in colour from brownish-green to black and are described by Ms. Pauwels as "very cute."

But it was their abundance that astounded her.

"At first I was skeptical, but once your eyes kind of adjust to them, because they're camouflaged ... it just seems like the ground is just alive with them. Hopping all over the place," she said.

One final question begs to be answered: Why do the toads cross the road?

Before jumping to any obvious conclusions - to get to the other side? - the answer appears to be more complex.

"They seem to be preprogrammed to go uphill [across] the highway," Ms. Pauwels said.

"They leave the wetlands where they hatched and went through the tadpoles phase and seemed preprogrammed to cross over to the west side of the highway into the forested lands. That's where they mature."