Alpenglow Magazine | Saving the Boreal Toad

Saving the Boreal Toad
Story and Photo By Martin F. Curry

It seems that toads just don’t get no respect.

Take the case of the Southern Rocky Mountain Boreal Toad, a warty, bug-eyed creature whose ancestors date back some 100-million years — long before dinosaurs ever set foot on the planet.

But this little guy’s name alone conjures up derision. Call someone a “toad” and you’d better be prepared for a fight: The term means anything from a stupid, contemptible ass to vulgarities that can’t even be printed here.

To add insult to injury — even though its populations have died off catastrophically since the mid-1970’s — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service turned thumbs down on the rugged little animals by refusing to consider them endangered — even though the Colorado Division of Wildlife lists the animal as the only amphibian on its endangered list.

“They definitely are not warm and cuddly like baby panda bears,” explains Greg Horstman, an independent wildlife biologist based in Fraser, whose project here might just solve a controversial mystery: Why are these tough-skinned hoppers caught in such as catastrophic decline?

Horstman stands on the bank of a small pond on a sunny fall day surrounded by lush, green willows that sway in a light breeze just off a busy fairway at the Pole Creek Golf Course. Golf carts drive past and balls whiz overhead. But this is not just another water hazard.

“Look, over here,” he points excitedly at a dark, brownish mound on a log near the shore. On closer inspection, that mound is actually a crowd of tiny toadlets, each one roughly the size of a pinky finger tip.

The squirming mass, about six inches high, is formed by 70 or 80 infant toads. It’s a scientific phenomenon known as post-metamorphic aggregation — but it looks like a miniature football team pileup from the games of the 50’s.

No one knows exactly why the toads do it. “They will actually climb on top of one another and stack up quite high — like 12, 15 or 20 high until the whole thing gets top heavy and comes tumbling down,” explains Horstman. “They all fall down and they’re all spread out. And they’ll start all over again. It’s unbelievable to watch.”

The pond thrives with boreal toads while populations elsewhere in the state and the country seem to be going the way of the dinosaur. It is part of a multi-year, privately funded research endeavor called the Crooked/Pole Creek Boreal Toad Recovery Project which includes some 23 breeding sites in a 40-square-mile area of the Fraser River River Valley.

But this pond at the golf course, constructed in 2000, was Horstman’s first. “There were no manuals,” he concedes.

The prevailing theory held by most wildlife experts and government agencies still holds that the toad’s decline is caused by a skin disease known as the chytrid fungus. But Horstman just didn’t buy into that theory. As a field technician for the Colorado Division of Wildlife in the mid 1990’s, he spent his days searching for the elusive toads and uncovered some 22 breeding sites throughout northwest Colorado.

Wherever he found toads, he also found telltale evidence of beavers. “So, I’m thinking, ‘This is interesting. I’m not seeing the boreal toads anywhere else.’”

They did not inhabit ponds where beavers currently lived because the dams blocked the streams and created deep, cold waters with none of the important shallows that the toads required for basic survival. But when beavers moved from of an area and their damns blew out, the water drained down to form perfect conditions for the small amphibians.

“It suddenly popped into my mind,” Horstman smiles. “It had to be habitat. It was the shallow water, maximum solar exposure, mud substrate, and a very gentle grade,” he says.

And that’s exactly what he created at his first pond at Pole Creek. While it may look like just another golf course obstacle, Horstman calculated every essential micro-habitat requirement imaginable, right on down to the depth of the breeding sites and the actual water supply, which flows from a real water hazard nearby.

He had help from a local excavator. “The guy could pick up a longneck Coors out of a six pack and flip the cap off with this huge machine,” laughs the wildlife expert. “If I told him I wanted a certain depth, say from two inches to 2 feet from here to there, he made it for me.”

Horstman then meticulously raked out the bottom by hand to eliminate traps. “When the water goes down, the tadpoles get stranded in the pools,” he says.

And just about as soon as this first pond opened for business, boreal toads just started showing up out of nowhere — although it took a full six years for the project to reach its current success. “This year was a breakthrough year,” he says. “This year we had tremendous increases in adults and we had thousands of metamorphs.”

Breakthrough or not, toads in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains face a never ending battle for survival. These tough little characters exist on a diet of miniscule bugs — and they must chomp down enough to survive six months hibernation in temperatures that can plunge to 50-below. “They have a very hard time eating enough food in the mountains,” he says. “It’s amazing they make it at all.”

Survival as a species comes down to a numbers game. When the female is ready to drop her eggs, the male then grasps her and rides her around as part of the fertilization ritual called amplexus.

But it doesn’t always go according to plan. “I found a female here with a male in amplexus,” says Horstman. “A couple of days later I found her over at the water hazards. She went back and forth carrying that male on her back for a whole week. She spent seven days dragging that male on her back until she was ready to deposit her eggs.”

Even with its remarkable survival over countless millennium, the toad still doesn’t get much respect. And it’s highly unlikely these guys will ever be featured in a popular coffee table book like river otters or sea turtles.

Just don’t try to tell that to Horstman. “I personally think they’re as fascinating a creature as you can get,” he says. “And my wife thinks they’re as cute as a bug’s ear.”

Warts and all.