Save the Toads Week a Huge Success!

FVC Youth Stewards Celebrate Save the Toads Week!

Students create "Toonie for a Toad" collection boxes

This year FVC celebrated “Save the Frogs Day” by holding a “Save the Toads Week” at Ecole Clearbrook Elementary School in Abbotsford. The week focused on creating awareness about amphibian conservation, as well as raising much-needed funding for the Fraser Valley Conservancy’s Ryder Lake Amphibian Protection Project (RLAPP).

The goal of the RLAPP is to identify the migration patterns of the Western Toad, along with other species of amphibians in the Ryder Lake area. Once monitoring is complete, we hope to have enough information about where the toads are crossing the roads so that we can install crossing structures in high migration areas. There are three migrations every year, two of which are the adults migrating to and from the wetlands during the breeding season, while the third solely consists of the juveniles’ mass migration from the wetlands to the forested upland. Over the past few years, the FVC has used selective road closures to allow safe and natural crossings for the toads, and has saved over 500,000 toads from being squished. Year round, the FVC raises money for this project through the Toonies for Toads Campaign. The toonies collected will be used to pay for the migration monitoring, traffic control during the toadlet migration and hopefully in the near future, a tunnel structure and fencing.

Cynthia from the Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve teaches the students about amphibian conservation

On April 30th, three classes of grade 4/5 students attended two presentations on amphibian conservation, and then decorated coin collection boxes which were used to collect donations from friends and family throughout the week. On May 2nd, a school-wide bake sale was held to raise even more funds, and on May 4th, a group of 30 grade 4 students visited the Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve in Chilliwack, where they learned more about wetlands and amphibian conservation, and were also able to witness several amphibian species in their natural environment. Through the course of the week, the students were able to raise an astounding total of $972.51! This means that this summer, the FVC will be able to save an additional 486 Western Toads!

-submitted by Navi Saini, FVC Youth Stewards Coordinator