Biologists worry about fate of endangered toad

BASTROP, Texas — Mike Forstner tromps along the mucky edge of a pond, trilling loudly as he sweeps the beam of his flashlight over the bank.

He's hoping for an answering call from an endangered Houston toad, but he hears nothing.

The tea-colored watering holes around Bastrop are the last stronghold of the endangered amphibian, which is about the size of a partially flattened apricot. But after years of drought and development, topped five months ago by searing wildfires, Forstner fears the worst.

"I believe the Houston toad effectively ceased to exist as a purely wild species on Sept. 5, 2011," said Forstner, 47, a biology professor at Texas State University who is spearheading the Houston toad recovery effort.

"We've had the most rain since 2002, and it was insignificant to motivate the Houston toad to chorus. That's not good."

A week after that late January hunt on Griffith League Scout Ranch, though, when temperatures warmed slightly, Forstner and his crews heard three of the grayish-brown toads chorusing in Bastrop County. The next night, they detected three more. Crews from the Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collection at Texas A&M University and the herpetology department of the Houston Zoo heard a few in Austin County, farther east, too.

The activity triggered a requirement that wildlife biologists inspect construction and debris removal sites inside areas that burned for toads before work can continue.

The croaking is a hopeful sign, but Forstner said long-term prospects remain grim.

Scientists monitoring the toads for the past five decades have observed a slow, steady decline in their numbers. The toads live in an increasingly fragmented habitat, their annual treks to breeding ponds bisected by roads. A fungus that affects toads and frogs and is suspected in a worldwide decline in amphibian populations might be partly to blame, too. Those forces, coupled with the drought and fires, probably have caused the collapse in population, Forstner said.

The Houston toad, the first amphibian placed on the endangered species list in 1970, is one of 10 species of toads found in Texas and the only one that lives solely in the Lone Star State. Once spread across 12 east-central Texas counties, they're now found mainly in Austin, Bastrop and Leon counties.

"It's a native species, a native Texan that needs help," said Paul Crumb, head of a captive breeding program at the Houston Zoo. "It illustrates the plight of what's going on with habitat and endangered species in the state."