It’s time to talk about toads.
Not just any toad. mind you. One special, Californian and very, very endangered toad. He happens to be poisonous to the touch and there is no known anti-venom.
This handsome blunt-nosed guy is the arroyo toad. Like that boyfriend you had in college, he only lives in parts of southern california and baja because he thrives on dry creek beds called washes that only fill with water part of the year. In 1994 he was placed on the endangered species list by USFWS. A decade later they discovered a breeding population in Monterey and toyed with bumping him down to “threatened’ but ultimately decided against it.
Factors contributing to the toad’s decline include urban development, agricultural conversion, mining and prospecting activities, operation of dams and changes in water flow, alteration of the natural fire regime, and road development and maintenance. Additionally, the introduction of non-native predator species, like the bullfrog, and limited water resources due to drought, led the species to be at risk of extinction.
Now i know what you’re thinking. You’re remembering all the times we discussed articles about beaver habitat being important for frogs and toads. FWS must be thrilled about having beavers discovered in San Diego!
A035
Not so fast. Here is the 2009 species report.
Of course when the center for biological diversity was called onto the scene they repeated this quote VERBATIM because everyone knows beavers just cause trouble. And beavers could never have lived in these arid places right? Because beavers need water to thrive.
See if beavers were native to califoria then beavers and arroyo toads would have gotten along for thousands of years and entirely adapted to each other and the vast threats to their reproduction and survival must be caused by other things that are very expensive to fix – like development and impermeable surfaces and freeways. If FWS just continues on their daydream that beavers are invasive and don’t belong in Fallbrook for example, they can just bring in USDA to kill them and all is good.
Which they have been doing. Over and over. for the last 50 years when beavers show up in the Santa Margarita River or Camp Pendleton for example. They are trapped out. Because of threats to the Arroyo toad. And it doesn’t matter that we published a paper in the journal of fish and game that documents how beavers belong in southern california and have been there since long before they were RE-introduced..
Because beavers aren’t endangered and the arroyo toad is. So there.
There’s one final irony in all this and it has to do with the strongest most enduring population of arroyo toads in California which is Sespe creek in Santa Barbara, And if that creek sounds familiar it should because Sespe creek is the location of one of the beaver skulls documented in Grinnell’s famously wrong book about where beavers belong in California. He didn’t think they belonged there so he highlighted the map with a question mark which dangled suggestively for nearly 80 years.<
That is, until the mighty Rick Lanman tracked down the correspondence of Joseph Grinnell and ornithologist John Hornung.
Recently digitized correspondence between Grinnell and Hornung has become available and settles this longstanding question. When Grinnell wrote Hornung asking for further details regarding the specimen; Hornung (1914:1-2) wrote back: “
“…In reference to the beaver, I will say that I murdered the specimen in question 3 miles east of Cold Springs. I was on horseback and saw on the river, enormously swollen as the date which you have [19 May 1906], what appeared to me as a dead large dog surrounded by branches of a big stump. This stump was swimming in the water, but anchored in a tangled mass of some kind of a vine. After some maneuvering I could reach this animal with a stick. As soon as I touched it, it showed its teeth, and I knew then what unexpected find I had made…A shot ended the animal’s sufferings, and I secured the skull which you have…”.
Hartman Cold Springs Ranch (34° 33’ N, 119° 15’ W) is located on upper Sespe Creek in the Sierra Madre Mountains at 1,025 m elevation and the creek along this stretch is quite low gradient, i.e. suitable beaver habitat. Interestingly there is a Beaver Camp on the USGS GNIS at 1,000 m elevation about 1 km east of Hartman Cold Springs Ranch, although its toponomastic origin is not known (Figure 3). In addition to the 1906 Sespe Creek beaver specimen, Hornung (1914:2) told Grinnell:
“There are still quite a few beaver in Southern California, myself being so lucky as to get hold of one as late as Dec. 24, 1913, 3 weeks ago.”
There aren’t many slam dunks in historical scientific literature, but if you are hearing a ringing in your ears it’s because THAT was one of the most memorable. i can still hear Rick’s excited voice on the phone as he breathlessly read back the email of the researcher who tracked this down.
Sometimes having the wrong answer is just so much easier.
