The jacks are back
Majella O’Sullivan
OVER 30 years ago, a golf club was carrying out drainage work on the 16th hole when a headline appeared in a national newspaper, ‘Golf club threatens endangered species’.
This was Dooks Golf Links Club in Glenbeigh, Co Kerry’s first introduction to the natterjack toad — listed as a protected species, one of only three amphibians native to Ireland, along with the common frog and the smooth newt.
The 128-year-old club subsequently adopted the natterjack as its club emblem and the two happily co-exist with the toads making their presence known by the distinctive croak of the male during mating season, which begins in April.
Former Dooks secretary, Declan Mangan, said the first they heard of it was when an article appeared in a national newspaper.
“We involved the conservation people then and brought them down and we built a shallow pond so they could lie on its verge.”
The club’s efforts were recognised by a EU conservation award in 1987.
Despite efforts like this, natterjack populations fell dramatically resulting in the species being listed as ‘endangered’ and their conservation status assessed as ‘unfavourable’ in the All-Ireland Red List.
The natterjack is distinctive by its croak and the way it moves. Unlike other amphibians, the natterjack crawls rather than hops.
It can be olive green to black in colour with yellow warts and a distinctive yellow stripe down its back.
The presence of the toad was first recorded in 1805 but by the 1980s it had become restricted to the Castlegregory area and about 10 isolated locations around Castlemaine, both on the Dingle Peninsula and in pockets around Rossbeigh across the water on the Iveragh Peninsula.
Since then, it has fared better, largely thanks to a scheme introduced by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) in 2008.
Under the scheme, farmers were encouraged to dig ponds on their land for the toad and are paid €500 per year per pond to maintain a maximum of two ponds.
The natterjack toad is protected under the EU’s Habitats Directive and the NPWS reports its findings to the EU Commission.
In addition to this, the NPWS also introduced a captive breeding programme in Fota Wildlife Park last year, which has been extended to Dingle’s Oceanworld Aquarium this year.
Under the programme, toad spawn laid in pools that were drying out are transferred to the two facilities where they are reared in tanks before being released back into the wild.
Populations are also being monitored for a three-year period by PhD student Marina Reneyn from Queens University in Belfast and in 2019 the most up-to-date estimation of the natterjack population will be determined.
Dr Ferdia Marnell of the NPWS Scientific Unit estimates the natterjack population to be around 10,000 but information from the current survey won’t be released until the report is completed in 2019.
Boom or bust
“Toads are naturally a boom or bust species,” said Dr Ferdia Marnell. “They only need a good year every four or five years to keep a breeding population going.
“In good years, when everything goes right, thousands of young toads can emerge onto land. 2014 has been the best year I ever remember and I’ve been studying them for nearly 20 years.
“Now the natterjack is only found at around 10 different spots but most of that decline happened in the first half of the 20th century or even before that,” Dr Marnell explains.
“One of the first things we reckon happened was that there were significant flood defences put in by the landowners, who had been draining coastal marshes and erecting sea walls.
“By the 1970s when the first surveys were done of the natterjack toad, they were probably down to about 50pc of what we reckon would have been their historical range.”
Since then, there haven’t been any further declines and in the past decade there have been gradual small and slow expansions of the range, mainly due to the NPWS scheme.
“We’ve 100 ponds now dug, most of them in Castlemaine Harbour and some up and around Castlegregory as well and the toads are very quick to move into these, provided they’re near existing sites and that they’re suitable,” he added.
That’s the first bit of encouraging news.
One of the big losses each year for the toad annually is within ponds.
Tadpoles get predated by dragonfly larvae and birds. The female can lay 3,000 to 4,000 eggs but only a tiny fraction of these ever reach juvenile stage and emerge from the pond due to the amount of predation that goes on.
“By taking out even small numbers of tadpoles, like the couple of hundred that have gone to Fota and Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium, we can nearly return all those animals at the end of the summer,” Dr Marnell said.
Although the natterjack toad was introduced in Wexford in