Toad Media

11 October 2006 - TIME: 12.53PM

STATION: 720 ABC PERTH THE WORLD TODAY (CAVE)

Original here http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1762497.htm

SUBJECT: CANE TOAD MUSTER

This transcript is produced for information purposes only. Although all care is taken, no warranty as to its accuracy or completeness is given. It is your responsibility to ensure by independent verification that all information is correct before placing any reliance on it.

PETER CAVE: One of the most remote regions of the Northern Territory is a frenzy of activity this month, as scores of people take part in an ambitious exercise to keep cane toads out of Western Australia.

It's known as the Cane Toad Muster, and over six weeks, more than a hundred people are going out every night trapping and gassing toads by the thousand.

They're hoping to make the muster an annual event - and maybe, just maybe, keeping Western Australia cane toad free.

And as Anne Barker reports, they're hoping to enlist dingos in the hunt.

(Sound of dingo crying)

ANNE BARKER: This is the latest weapon in the cane toad war.

(Sound of dingo crying)

SARAH FYFFE: Good girl, well done.

ANNE BARKER: This four-month-old pup is one of four dingos being trained to hunt down cane toads in the far west of the Top End, near the West Australian border.

SARAH FYFFE: Good baby.

ANNE BARKER: Already they're showing huge promise.

SARAH FYFFE: You can have 20 or 30 people out there searching an area, but you're always going to miss the toads. And what we did up there, we've used Buffy as, effectively, mopping up.

ANNE BARKERR: Sarah Fyffe is a professional dog trainer who's already tested Buffy and other dingos in the field, just inside the Northern Territory border.

The 50 or so kilometres east of Kununurra is now the front line in the cane toad's relentless spread west.

SARAH FYFF: She went behind everyone, everyone got the toads that were easily obtainable, and Buffy went along and got the ones that were hiding behind them.

People have discovered that in areas where there's dry creek beds, the toads are actually going under that cracked earth.

Now, we can't lift up every single piece of dirt and check for toads, but a dog can run their nose over and go, ooh, there's a pocket of them here.

ANNE BARKER: And presumably you train the dingos not to eat the toads?

SARAH FYFFE: No, no, they all know not to touch. They're taught the same sort of techniques as your explosives detection dogs, that it's not a good idea to touch the toad, for their own safety.

ANNE BARKER: It's still several months before dingos will be used here on a regular basis, but this month more than a hundred human predators are taking part in the first cane toad muster.

Every night they're out prowling around the local billabongs, trapping and gassing the unsuspecting toads in their thousands.

One of the organisers, Graeme Sawyer, says already they've caught nearly 6,000 toads.

GRAEME SAWYER: So you're walking along the edge of a waterhole, shining a bright spotlight ahead of you, and you just see all these bumps all over the ground, and actually when you get closer they turn out to be cane toads.

And they're quite docile animals, they just sit around hunting. They just sit up in their upright posture, scanning the ground for insects. So they're pretty easy to catch, most of the time.

And the floodplain itself is fairly easy country for toad busts. It's pretty flat, the waterholes are pretty easy to get to, and in the dry season the cane toads have to be on those waterholes.

ANNE BARKER: So what will that mean, you have to have a muster like this every year?

GRAEME SAWYER: Yeah, until we come up with a biological solution, which some of the scientists are now saying might be three to four years away, we'll probably need to do something similar to this repeatedly, yeah.

I guess the big challenge is to see if we can't hold this toad front up long enough to give the scientists a chance to do their bit, and hopefully stop the devastation that we've seen in the Top End in Kakadu from happening in the Kimberleys.

ANNE BARKER: So you're hoping that you could keep Western Australia toad free?

GRAEME SAWYER: Well, that was the ultimate plan. I mean, it would've been nice to have had operations like this happening two years ago. They would've given themselves a bit more of a buffer zone.

But the thing is this country over here around Timber Creek is really, really hard on cane toads at this time of the year. It's very hot and very dry, and so cane toads really don't have any options much in what they can do. They have to go to water.

And so, like, when we were flying around that floodplain on the first two days, mapping it from helicopters, you're looking at hundreds and hundreds of square kilometres, but in reality that comes down to about 15 or 20 water points, and that's all we've got to check.

We haven't got to worry about the rest of the floodplain, which makes our job much more achievable.

PETER CAVE: Graeme Sawyer, one of the organisers of the first cane toad muster, talking to Anne Barker in Darwin.

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