ON the last Wednesday night of the school holidays on January 23, Beechmont Landcare participated in the Watergum annual Cane Toad Bust at Beechmont Pioneer Reserve.
Watergum is a not-for-profit environmental organisation based on the Gold Coast and this initiative raises awareness of the environmental impact of invasive cane toads.
The activity was led by Catherine Madden, the Scenic Rim Regional Council’s Senior Biodiversity Officer and Land for Wildlife Representative and Brett Malcolm, an amateur frog enthusiast who curates the free Queensland Frogs Facebook page. Despite not being an official expert Brett knows his stuff.
Most people know that Cane Toads are poisonous and do a tremendous amount of damage to our local fauna. The Cane Toad Bust initiative helps give communities the incentive to round up the toads and eliminate them from our environment.
We learnt how to handle cane toads, how to humanely kill them after capture (by putting them in the fridge for 24 hours to put them to sleep and then freezing them) and how to tell them apart from the native frogs. We were also introduced to the relatively new lure that can be put into dams and bodies of still water to catch Cane Toad tadpoles. This is sold through Watergum.
It was great fun spotlighting in the warm summer evening and along the way our eagle- eyed participants spotted all sort of other native frogs.
We hope to run this again next year, in the summer school holidays, as it is a great free event for adults and children.
