One Afternoon last August, I was one of thousands swarming the beach at Lost Lake Park—though only a hundred of those were actually people. The rest of the crowd was less obvious: behind a low barrier on a marshy corner, multitudes of newly metamorphosed Western Toads, each smaller than a fingernail, were exiting the water to take their first tentative hops on land.
Having spent their time since springtime hatching wriggling around as tadpoles, the new environment—not to mention novel acts of breathing air and using legs—takes some getting used to, and the toadlets had appeared to pause to consider this trope of rebirth, an echo of the water-to-land transition pioneered by amphibian ancestors in the Devonian Period. That meant 370 million years of evolution packed into the DNA of these tiny titans—and plenty of instinct. With a new range of hazards rendering the beach even more perilous than the lake, the toadlets were quick to get moving again, heading for the cover of vegetation.
Over the next few days they’d follow a route shaded by quarter-round plastic fencing to gain the forest in which they’d either prosper or perish. By design, nature had favoured the latter; indeed, fewer than one per cent of these determined emigrants would make it to adulthood. And the gauntlet started along the fence, where potential death awaited from heat, desiccation and predation by gartersnake, crow or shrew, each patiently awaiting the chance to gobble its fair share.
But while nature was nasty, the fencing obviated a far larger threat: humans. With the odds already stacked against them, added mortality of busy roadways, trails and lawns could tip the balance for a local toad population. And for years here, there was indeed cause for worry: each summer, thousands of toadlets were squashed by people, bikes and cars as they struggled toward the forest. It wasn’t malicious—they were just too small and the rest of the world too big and indifferent. And so, for several weeks each summer, visitors were treated to constellations of tiny carcasses. The optics were bad, the biodiversity impacts worse.
The Resort Municipality of Whistler eventually installed fencing to direct forest-bound toadlets away from high-risk areas. It also protected breeding and tadpole habitat, installed interpretive signage and constructed permanent underpasses—plus a new bridge!—to funnel toadlets along several preferred routes (these can change year to year). Now, when toadlet emergence is nigh, more temporary aid structures are added and the access road and parking lot closed; park visitors can grab a shuttle from the village to within half a kilometre. During this time, volunteers dressed like crossing guards in hi-viz vests patrol the area, answering questions (there are plenty), politely asking visitors to watch their step or walk their bikes, and scooping up errant toadlets, ferrying them in plastic cups to the safe side of the fence.
That day last August, I was myself a toad guardian. Several years had passed since I’d last volunteered and I noticed two positives. First, increased buy-in from park users, who, save for the occasional entitled or litigious type (https://shorturl.at/dNdJh) seemed more interested than inconvenienced. And second: far fewer dead toads. Something was working.
As I answered a query about why toadlets piled up together (the same reason tadpoles swarm—safety in numbers), two kids tore across the lawn between beach and forest. The older, a girl, held aloft a cup, trailed by her excited younger brother. A frazzled voice in the distance pleaded for them to stop running. “But mom—we’re saving toads!”
Though the Western Toad is found in 80 per cent of B.C., it’s also listed as a provincial Conservation Concern and of Special Concern under the federal Species at Risk Act, so it’s great to see this happening in Whistler. Better still to know similar efforts are underway across the province. Even where nature is protected and celebrated, roads and trails have negative effects on toads in the often-shortsighted drive to create recreational space. Which is why a good chunk of B.C.’s toad conservation occurs in provincial parks.
Rachel Shephard of the Squamish Environment Society (SES) manages a Western Toad-monitoring project at Fawn and Edith Lakes in Alice Lake Provincial Park, an area laced with trails where toads were annually getting squashed—in part because no one knew anything about the populations. “We figured we could learn more than just the anecdotal information we were getting from hikers,” says Shephard, who, in partnership with B.C. Parks, marshals volunteers to keep an eye on tadpole growth and development and, when they exit the lake, conduct toadlet counts at various transects. “We want to know if they’re crossing trails, where, and the level of mortality,” she says of information used to visualize hotspots that require mitigation. “We’re basically eyes on the ground, gathering all sorts of data relevant to the health of the population.”
Although long-term monitoring and data-gathering are the two most important things in conservation, they’re the least-likely practices to be funded by governments, which prefer quick solutions that make them look good. It can turn even the most noble conservation effort into a best-guess scenario. And toads are notorious for keeping people guessing. For instance, why do they choose certain wetlands or lakes to breed in? And what is actually a threat to them? (See underwater camera footage of invasive sunfish gulping in tadpoles then spitting them out captured by an SES volunteer: youtube.com/watch?v=WfO7XLYGklw.)
It helps that people genuinely tend to like toads; there’s something about their ubiquity, their stern-yet-unmalign stare, that makes for an acceptable emissary of the chthonic domain—friendly characters from fairy tales and kids’ books.
As elsewhere, tracking what’s happening at Fawn and Edith Lakes requires diligence; every year is different with respect to water level or weather, and thus, toad movements and timing. “We just try and do the same thing every year to the best of our ability,” says Shephard. “And use those data to mitigate impacts.”
Leslie Anthony is a biologist, writer and author of several popular books on environmental science.
