WEST AUSTRALIAN (Perth, Australia) 04 February 08 Destructive cane toads close in on WA border (Peter Kerr)
A top cane toad buster has called for urgent Government support to halt the spread of the destructive amphibians that are now only 53km from the WA border.
Perth Friends of the Kimberley Toad Busters’ co-ordinator Sandy Boulter said the big volunteer-led effort to thin the ranks of the advancing plague would only succeed with government funding for research into better methods of capturing the scourge of native wildlife in the top end.
“We’d welcome State Government funding for research into better ways of capturing toads, as opposed to killing or biologically controlling them,” she said. “If we could find an odour or a sound where every toad within cooee thought ‘oh, I like that’ and go there, we could pick them up more efficiently rather than being spread over a massive landscape, which is extremely trying.
“Finding a new poison isn’t going to help, because we still have to pick them up and bury them (so animals don’t eat them).”
The State Government announced a $1 million funding boost for the fight against cane toads in October. But Ms Boulter said the KTB project could be expanded if funding was provided for full-time staff.
“What we’re running as volunteers is a military exercise,” she said. “We have a dozen vehicles and sheds full of equipment and we really need some full-time employees.”
Ms Boulter said the toads were now just 20km from an endangered pygmy crocodile colony on Bullo River station in the Northern Territory, having killed at least 10 freshwater crocodiles on Auvergne station south of Bullo.
Bullo is believed to be the last refuge of the tiny crocs.
But Ms Boulter said the battle to stop the pests could be won.
“When we started busting we were finding carpets of toads; you couldn’t put your foot down without touching them,” she said. “But now, because we’ve taken so many breeding toads out of the forward colonisers, the number of toads moving westwards is vastly reduced.”
Toads killed everything and would have a shocking impact on the environment, Ms Boulter said.
Destructive cane toads close in on WA border