LONDON — It’s 7 o’clock on Saturday evening in the London borough of Richmond upon Thames. Diane Slater and her friend Jon Fray pull on boots, yellow safety vests and rubber gloves and pick up powerful flashlights and big, white buckets.
They are going on toad patrol, as they do almost every evening for six weeks beginning in early spring. They walk from their modest row house to where a road runs between woods called Ham Common and a mysterious walled estate that appears to contain the toads’ breeding grounds.
They train their lights along a chicken-wire barrier that runs for about 100 meters, or 330 feet, along the woods side of the road. When they find toads, they put them in a bucket and carry them across the road.
The history of the Ham Common toad patrol goes back about three years, when Ms. Slater, coming home on her bicycle from her job at a library, was horrified to find dozens of squashed toad carcasses on the road.
“I saw them splattered,” she said. “It can be quite heart-wrenching.” She started braving oncoming vehicles in the bucolic but sometimes busy lane trying to save the animals.
“It was hell in 2010,” she said, “with the cars coming at me.”
Wondering what was going on, she called Tasha Hunter, the staff ecologist at the Richmond Council, the local governing body, who told her that she had discovered a toad crossing. The council now puts up toad crossing signs as well as the fence and even closes the road for part of the migration season.
Last year, Ms. Slater and a small group of helpers managed to ferry 306 toads across the road, while as far as she knows — and she monitors the road carefully — only 14 were killed by cars. Three hundred may be small in the big scheme of things, but a few people are doing a very effective job of conserving a local animal while spending little or no money.
There are about 100 of these toad-on-road programs in Britain, and participants say volunteering for them is very satisfying at a time when they are strapped for cash to donate to environmental causes.
“It’s simple grass-roots conservation,” said Angelina Jones, who helps organize a toad patrol for one of the largest toad populations in Britain, in Henley-on-Thames and Marlow, west of London. “It’s something you can see work fairly quickly. At the end of six weeks, you have 7,800 toads who would have been lost to cars.”
Toads may not be as glamorous as large endangered species like tigers and elephants that receive a lot of attention, but along with many other amphibian and reptile species, they are widely viewed to be in decline, and all that is required to aid them is the ability to get to one of the rescue locations and be able to cross the road without being killed.
“We do think patrolling makes a difference, because of the sheer scale,” said Silviu Petrovan, conservation coordinator of Froglife, a charity that tries to protect amphibians and reptiles.
Mr. Petrovan said the toad patrols may be transporting as much as 40 percent or 50 percent of local toad populations — more than 60,000 animals per year.
Toads are creatures of fatal habit. Mostly terrestrial animals, they are determined to return to the body of water in which they were born to mate and lay their eggs.
Their usual haunts — damp woods and meadows, where they hunt for insects and other food — are often considerable distances from the large bodies of water they prefer for spawning. In densely populated Britain, that often means they need to cross a road, leading to enormous casualties if nothing is done.
The Henley-Marlow toad patrol, which dates from the 1980s, takes place at dusk at the height of the rush hour on a humming commuter route. When the weather warms up to about 8 degrees Celsius (46 Fahrenheit), the toads, some of them already paired up for breeding, try to move en masse across the asphalt to a large pond in the grounds of the Henley Business School.
At the beginning of the breeding season, the toad patrollers put up a plastic barrier along the woodland side of the road and spend hours each evening collecting the toads that it traps. They place the toads in buckets, segregated into mating pairs and singles, and carry them to the water’s edge.
“If we didn’t put up the barrier, the toad population would be decimated in a very short number of years,” Ms. Jones said.
Instead, this individual population may be increasing — though tracking toad numbers is an inexact science. The number of animals rescued has averaged about 7,800 per year recently, compared with about 2,500 in the mid-2000s.
“If all the 100 toad-on-the-road schemes stopped, would we lose toads from the U.K.?” said John Sumpter, a professor of environmental science at Brunel University in London. “The answer would probably be no, but the numbers would be very significantly reduced.”
That’s important to volunteers who — unlike other environmental activists — see their work pay off quickly. At the end of a long evening, Ms. Jones sometimes shines her light on the pairs of mating toads in the pond.
“There are masses in the water, and its brilliant,” she said. “You’ve come straight from work and you are hungry, but this makes it all worthwhile.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/business/energy-environment/rescuing-toads-from-traffic.html?partner=rss&emc=rss