Passport to Texas

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This is Passport to Texas

Wildfires that ignited Labor Day Weekend consumed more than thirteen hundred homes and tens of thousands of drought-stricken acres in Bastrop County, east of Austin, including much of Bastrop State Park: prime habitat of the endangered Houston Toad.

14—Even though the fire was incredibly intense on the surface, and would have affected all of the leaf littler that would have been on the forest floor, Houston Toads—even a few inches below the surface of the ground—would probably have been okay.

Mike Forstner, a professor at Texas State University whose work focuses on the toad, expects minimal mortality of adult animals as a direct result of the event.

Yet, months of severe drought in tandem with the fire add up to future challenges for this unique amphibian.

28—Depending on how the fire action was at a given location, the issues we will face is a loss of canopy cover, which for the toad is a bad deal. But we’ll also face drought impacts on the trees that remain. When we do get beneficial rains, the trees that have been killed will fall as their roots are loosened and hit trees that were not killed—exacerbating the affects yet again.

Food availability and poor water quality are future challenges for the toad, and we’ll talk about those issues tomorrow.

Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration Program supports our series.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2011 at 12:00 am and is filed under Endangered, Wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.