AUS Press: Border security's ugly, smelly and slimy front line

[Herp News]

THE AGE (Melbourne, Australia) 10 October 09 Border security's ugly, smelly and slimy front line (Liz Minchin)
We're speeding through the darkness in a packed four-wheel-drive, seven recruits heading to the front line to capture and kill foreign invaders in far north Australia.
We're out hunting cane toads, which are on the brink of spreading across Western Australia's Kimberley wilderness, wiping out native goannas, turtles, quolls, lizards and snakes along their path towards Broome and Perth.
The annual Great Toad Muster is now in its fourth year, and despite the searing heat and sometimes slimy, smelly work, the current month-long muster has attracted a record 140 volunteers. Dozens more wanted to come, but had to be turned away for lack of funding.
Armed only with spotlights, heavy-duty garbage bags and specially designed toad fences, the musterers have bagged, tagged and gassed more than 130,000 toads in the past three years.
With two days to go before this year's muster ends, the tally is more than 42,000.
Originally from South America, cane toads were introduced to Queensland canefields in the mid-1930s in a bungled attempt to contain cane beetles.
Their population has exploded because each adult female can lay up to 30,000 eggs at a time. Their toxin is lethal to Australian animals. Even their tadpoles are venomous.
Having spread unchecked across Queensland, northern NSW and the Northern Territory, there are now up to 200 million cane toads in Australia.
While a handful have hitchhiked as far as Perth and Fremantle inside fruit boxes and on trucks, the main western front lies just inside the WA border.
With so many toads on the march, some say the fight to contain their westward march is pointless.
But muster organisers are optimistic that they can, at least, prevent important areas from being overrun, by fencing off and systematically clearing waterholes where toads gather after dusk until the wet season rains arrive.
Designed by frog lover and Darwin Lord Mayor Graeme Sawyer, the fences can be built cheaply with shade cloth and pickets, with mesh at the bottom that is too narrow for toads but still allows snakes, lizards and native frogs to wriggle through.
On the first night after fencing off the edge of a billabong or dam, a four-wheel-drive load of volunteers can fill bag after bag with several thousand toads from along the fenceline. After a week of return visits, there is little more than a handful left to collect.
The fences are mostly built at the Toad Muster base camp, a temporary tent city on a cattle station 70 kilometres east of Kununurra, near the WA-NT border. The local TAFE and prison have also been working together, teaching prisoners to make ready-to-roll fences.
The toads are surprisingly easy to catch, especially if you grab them before they reach the water. Female toads are typically bigger and smoother, with skin like soft leather, while the males have a slightly rougher, sandpaper feel.
Although the milky toxin that toads secrete when stressed is lethal to ingest, handling them poses little threat, so only a few squeamish volunteers bother wearing gloves after their first night.
After a long drive back to base along pot-holed cattle tracks, we carry the heavy bags to ''Toad Hall'' - a tarpaulin-covered area about 100 metres downwind of the central kitchen and living area.
The toads are gassed in the bags with carbon dioxide, and are dead within about 30 seconds.
It's a method picked up via the internet from the French: it's how they kill frogs whose legs are destined for gourmet restaurants.
The worst job to do each morning is to tip out the slimy bags to count how many toads were caught at each waterhole, then load them back into a four-wheel-drive, which takes them to a pit five kilometres from camp.
But there are deadlier hazards too, such as the king brown snake coiled beneath a tree a metre from our creekside track; a whip snake slithering through camp; and the red flash of crocodile eyes reflecting back in our torchlight.
None of it deters the volunteers, a mix of retirees, backpackers, tradies and professionals, aged nine to 80. Most are from Perth, but a few are from as far away as Melbourne, Tasmania, Germany and South Korea.
''When people say to me, 'Why do you bother?', I say come out and see what a difference we can make with this many people,'' says Stop the Toad Foundation campaign manager Kim Hands.
''Imagine how much more we could do if we could take more volunteers. You never know what you can achieve until you try.''
Cane Toad
Border security's ugly, smelly and slimy front line