Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/118157
MER M CO SE O N . . SU 1 10 ❂ N I RVAT How to Save a Wetland? One Frog at a Time by Dawn Green p h o t o g r a p h b y G e r r y E l l i s Garibaldi Springs Golf Course, Squamish, B.C. They're already huddled in groups of three, a quirky collection of university students, environmental educators and retirees knee-deep in green pond scum – intently mapping one-metre-square quadrants with hand-held compasses and madly scribbling on wilting fielddata sheets. Overhead, the summer sky arcs in a half-moon of blue. A swallow swoops low over water the colour of chocolate, the staccato chirps of songbirds echo in the surrounding underbrush. Just one hour into the second day of this wetland conservation course (the province's premier citizen-science program according to the BC Wildlife Federation), and our fingers are already curled stiff with the damp. Sqquelchh. It's a sudden, loud, mud-sucking sound; 12 heads swivel in unison toward Gabriella Samson. Oy, that was close. The 20-something biology student is filthy with reeking plant matter. But she's laughing as hands reach gingerly to pull her from the pond's sudden drop-off, saved from complete immersion with only centimetres of hip wader to spare. Me, I'm still struggling into the day's de rigueur waders under biologist and wetland conservation instructor Elke Wind's indulgent gaze. Sensibly, she grabs the opportunity to regale a curious journalist on the significance of two key wetland species, slimy but charismatic critters Wind has studied since the 1990s: the red-legged frog and western toad. Found only in southwestern B.C. and on Vancouver Island, the former is "a species of special concern" across Canada according to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). The latter is a stocky, stumpy-legged character that tends to walk rather than hop, and whose numbers in southwestern B.C. are similarly declining due to pollution, disease and the steady erosion of wetland habitat by agriculture, industry and illegal garbage dumping. The importance of wetlands as nature's freshwater purifiers, reservoirs, flood-control systems and carbon "sinks" is increasingly evident to the scientific community, and now to the 12 of us in this, our first wetland identification, restoration and conservation workshop. And as we discovered in an earlier class on aerial-map-reading and wetland vegetation, despite their unassuming appearance and temperament, few other creatures are as vital as frogs and toads to the survival of wetlands and other local ecosystems. A CRUCIAL INDICATOR SPECIES The pair provide food of ecosystem health, frogs exist smack in the middle of the food web. They prey on for other species and insects and invertebrates, but are in turn transport wetland nutriprey themselves to birds, mammals and ents into surrounding snakes. (left) The red-legged variety is listed as "a species of special concern." ecosystems as they Gerri Ellis/Getty p26-37_Summer101.indd 35 WESTWORLD >> S U M M E R 2 0 1 2 35 4/19/12 7:17:53 AM