I think he’s beautiful.

It might be the bump between his eyes. Mmmm, mmm, mmm, h-a-n-d-s-o-m-e. Of course, you can’t forget about those orange bumps all over his back. Woooweee, sexy! And who could resist such stubby legs, broad waist and pug nose?? Just perfect.

We met him on our hike out to Gold Butte in southeastern Nevada. He was just hanging out by the wa-ter, having a good old time. All of us women on the trip couldn’t resist his bodily charms. I have to admit it: I usually don’t do this at watering holes, but I picked him up. Yep, that’s right! Was my heart racing or what? I was so excited to be the initiator that I forgot my senses and shared him with the rest of the women! After we were through with him I think he was a little overwhelmed, but we left him in the same exact place we found him, and he was completely unharmed.

Now, I certainly do NOT suggest that all of you la-dies out there follow my lead. As I said, I usually don’t pick up men at watering holes, but this was a special oc-casion. I was giving the Nevada Wilderness Project’s Gold Butte campers a closer look at the splendid Great Basin Spadefoot Toad.

Those of us at Gold Butte that day -- Mackenzie, Dean, Cameron, Nancy 1, John and Lynn, Debra, Tory and my-self -- were lucky to see that toad. You see, Gold Butte is at the very southern tip of the Great Basin Spadefoot Toad’s range, and the adults are only sporadically out at the ponds under excellent breeding condi-tions. Any further south or on any other day, and we probably would have never even known he was there.

If we had hiked in Gold Butte just one week ear-lier, that toad would have been underground where he had been for the last seven months. Underground is where spadefoot toads hibernate outside of their breeding

season. When it’s time to go down, they make circles with their big back toes that are shaped like spades (handsome and talented!), and they back themselves into the soil or in an

abandoned small mammal burrow and take a long winter

nap. Their metabolism falls to 20% during their hi-bernation, which is a good thing as they still lose up to half of their weight in water and fat reserves. Be-cause the male we saw had just emerged from the rains a few days earlier, he was pretty svelte. By now I’m sure he’s nice and plump. Delicious.

I know that our guy was definitely at least two years old, because by that age Spadefoot Toads are sexually mature -- and our guy was definitely sexually ma-ture. Within a matter of days he had found his territory on the pond’s edge and was calling out to the ladies. The call, yet another sexy trait, has been described as a grating snore-like quack (“gwaa”) and can attract females for quite a distance. The ladies of course get the pleasure of checking out the males and perhaps letting one mount them. This is not unlike the Las Vegas club scene.

In only 2-3 days after the female and male release their eggs and sperm into the pond water, the fertilized eggs hatch into tiny tadpoles. The tad-poles are so small (millimeters) that you wouldn’t even know they were tadpoles, except that they are oblong, have a shape and occasionally wiggle. Within a week, however, these tadpoles have a full suite of functioning organs, most very much like you and me -- spleens, livers, hearts, intestinal tracts, thymus glands, you name it. You can’t even see some of their organs with your naked eye, but they are there.

Continued on page 3

Spring Time!- pg. 1 Volunteer Spotlight, Business Spotlight, & Director’s Corner - pg. 2 Great Basin Spadefoot Toad continued - pg. 3 Gold Butte Update - pg. 4 NWP Fundraising & Caption Contest - pg. 5 WILD Calendar - pg. 6

Nevada Wilderness Project

Spring Time!

In this Issue:

Spring 2006

Al Richmond

Tory Garrason

Nancy Beecher

Business Spotlight:

NWP Board of Directors Bret Birdsong, President

Brian O’Donnell, Vice President

Chris Todd

Morlee Griswold

Tori King

Lynn Schiek

NWP Staff John Wallin, Director

Kristie Connolly, Associate Director

Nancy Beecher, Conservation Dir.

Erika Pollard, Nat’l Outreach Dir.

Mackenzie Banta, Development Dir.

Cameron Johnson, N. Outreach Dir.

Cynthia Scholl, Membership Coord.

Nancy Hall, Gold Butte Org.

Coalition Partners Campaign for America’s Wilderness

Friends of Nevada Wilderness

Nevada Outdoor Recreation Assoc.

Red Rock Audubon Society

Sierra Club - Toiyabe Chapter

The Wilderness Society

One of things that I believe makes NWP so special and more effective than other advocacy groups is that our members are given the opportunity to be directly in-volved in our work. This edition’s volunteer spotlight falls on four volunteers who helped make our three Earth Day events a huge success. Vanessa Belz, Kristen Ashbaugh, Cali Crampton, and Andy Mitchell help col-lect a thousand letters in support of protecting our wild places in White Pine and Washoe Counties.

For those who have not ever worked at or visited a Earth Day celebration it can be a lot like a mall on the day after Thanksgiving. Complete pandemonium! You have people coming from all directions, asking all sorts of ques-tions, wanting to sign letters, buy a t-shirt, or just grab a bumper sticker. It is an impossible task for one person and more than enough for two or three to handle. Our volunteers are not only up to date on the issues at hand they are also the best spokespeople we have. They can recount tales of adventure and mishap in the back-country with us, explain how we provide opportunities for them to get involved, and attest to the overall fun that is the Nevada Wilderness Project. As our newest volun-teer, Vanessa Belz told me rather plainly the other day, “As much as I like hanging out with you Cameron you’re only 10% of the reason why I’m here, 90% is because I care about the issue,” which is exactly the way we think it should be too.

Page 2 www.wildnevada.org Spring 2006

Nevada Wilderness Project

8550 White Fir Street Reno, NV 89523 775.746.7850

www.wildnevada.org 501 (c) (3) non-profit

corporation

NWP Mission Statement

The Nevada Wilderness Project is committed to

saving spectacular, rug-ged-and imperiled-public

lands in Nevada as Wilderness, the strong-est protection possible.

Have you heard? Your web searches can benefit the Nevada Wilderness Project! Logon to www.goodsearch.com, a Yahoo search engine that contributes $0.01 to your charity choice for every time you search the web. Just type the Nevada Wil-derness Project into the field asking for a charity name and search away!

Ditch Google and make a difference by doing what you do everyday.

Volunteer Spotlight: The Earth Day Crew!

Carson City Earth Day, photo by Leslie Bensinger

This month we bid a fond farewell to our friend and colleague Kevin Mack, who has been named Vice President for Conservation Programs at the Potomac Conservancy in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Kevin is in every sense of the word a founder of the Nevada Wilderness Project. Hired just two months after I left Patagonia to work on wilderness full time, Kevin’s fingerprints are on every successful aspect of our organization. He started as our Inventory Coordinator, overseeing the chal-lenging and detailed fieldwork operation that drives our advocacy. As a small organization, each of us is required at different times to wear many hats to fulfill our mission. To Kevin’s credit and our salvation, his efficient jack-of-all-trades abilities made us a better organization at every turn.

For the last four years, Kevin has served as the Washington Representative of the Project, acting as an effective and good humored conduit for our grassroots feedback to the Nevada Congres-sional delegation. Kevin’s unique skill sets range from the biological (he’s an accomplished birder), to the technical (he taught himself how to use our complicated mapping software, ArcView),

Continued on page 5

Director’s Corner— New Beginnings

Great Basin Spadefoot Toad

Page 3 www.wildnevada.org Spring 2006

From this point on, it takes 4-6 weeks for these Spadefoot Toad tadpoles to fully develop. They grow, their organs improve, and they become strong and agile. Of course, this is thanks to their well-rounded diet. They eat algae, leaves, aquatic plants, their own feces... each other....

And then they metamorphose. Everybody knows about metamorphosis. It’s a tadpole turning into a frog, an caterpillar into a moth, Franz Kafka into a butterfly. But when you think about it, metamorphosis is amazing. A huge portion of the inside and outside of the animal is broken down and recreated. Entire organs are dismantled and rebuilt. Gills are completely absorbed and lungs are created from scratch.

Legs are grown, with the back legs developing on the outside of the body and the front legs under the surface of the skin. When the front legs pop out (ouch), the metamorphs crawl out of the water, and for the next week they get all of their nutrition from their tail being slowly reabsorbed into their body. Not a bad trick, indeed.

In the desert, all of this is extra risky business. Spadefoot Toad tadpoles often develop in temporary ponds in the desert -- in other words, ponds that dry up under the hot, hot sun. That pond in Gold Butte where we found our handsome fella? That had just been a dry indentation in the soil

and rock a week prior to our visit, and I don’t dare to wonder if it’s still around. The sky will not provide frequent rain, the sun will evaporate the water, and the pond will certainly dry up.

The tadpoles sense this impending doom. They can tell when the pond is losing water and they get stressed out, just like you or I would. In fact, the stress hormone that they produce is pretty much the exact same stress hormone that you and I and many other organisms produce, thanks to evolutionary in-heritance. You may have heard about it: cortisol. Single working mothers and pressured fathers have loads of it. So do pregnant mothers -- and fetuses -- when something is wrong in the womb. But where we may go into premature labor, some tadpoles metamorphose early into frogs. This phenomenal evolu-tionary adaptation helps ensure that instead of shriveling up as a dead tadpole in a dried pond bed, Spadefoot Toads can go from egg to tadpole to toad in just a couple of weeks.

While many frog and toad species around the world are in serious decline, some even facing per-manent extinction, the Great Basin Spadefoot Toad seems to be doing OK (at least in Nevada). It can live in forest as well as desert, and it resides in a number of western U.S. states. Nonetheless, I am writing this article because the Great Basin Spadefoot Toad is a species that deserves our attention.

We humans seem to focus so much on species in dire need that we forget to pay attention to the species that appear to be doing just fine. We forget to put our efforts into recognizing the communities of plants and animals and other living biota that are out there defining our landscape. We fight to save remnants of diminishing habitats, which is an admirable effort for sure, but meanwhile fail to conserve the larger landscapes of healthy living beings.

To do this would be more fruitful than waiting until near-extinction and pan-icking. To do this would entail valuing the amazing evolutionary adaptations that organisms have developed over thousands and millions of years. To do this would require the recognition of what it takes to have healthy, persistent communities of organisms and ecosystems. To do this would require forethought and wisdom.

I see forethought and wisdom in my colleagues and our vision to protect Nevada’s wilderness. I see forethought and wisdom in those of you who are reading these very words. And I thank you.

In 2002, the Nevada Wilderness Coalition proposed a number of areas in the Gold Butte region for Wilder-ness designation. While some areas did achieve Wilderness status, approximately 90% of the proposed ar-eas did not. We continue to advocate for their protection.

Nancy Beecher

Nancy Beecher

Gold Butte Update Nevada’s piece of the Grand Canyon Puzzle

Page 4 www.wildnevada.org Spring 2006

The Las Vegas BLM will hold informational meetings for the designation of roads in the Gold Butte area. The objective is to protect critical habitat for the Desert Tortoise and the cultural and scenic resources while meeting the access needs of recreational users. The meetings are from 5PM to 8PM:

May 31, Las Vegas, interagency office 4701 North Torrey Pines June 1, Logandale/Moapa, Ron Lewis Fine Arts Building, Clark

County fairgrounds

June 6, Mesquite, Mesquite city Hall

June 8, Bunkerville, Gym next to Community Center

Anyone interested, but unable to attend a meeting, contact the BLM 702-515-5292 or marc_maynard@blm.gov and request placement on the mailing list.

Comments are needed expressing concern for the protection of Wilder-ness quality areas such as Garrett Butte and Bitter Ridge, Mojave De-sert habitat, and cultural resources like the petroglyphs that are hidden throughout the area. Identified by several agencies as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, the transportation plan should prioritize this requirement. In addition, washes are a dynamic and intricate part of this ecosystem, and should be scruti-nized in the designation and not left open for off road vehicle travel. Questions related to this spectacular area? Please contact Nancy Hall at nancy.hall@wildnevada.org.

Nancy Hall is our newest face here at NWP and we could not be happier. Nancy has been a superstar volunteer with us for the past six years or so and was successful in making the Mormon Mountains a place that Congress could not ignore. Today, the Mormon Mountains is a wilderness area of over 157,000 acres! Nancy loves this mountain range, but also has a special place in her heart for the Gold Butte region south of Mesquite. We are ecstatic to have Nancy join our team from her home in Mes-quite where she will work on behalf of the threatened wilderness landscape of this

area. Nancy is married with grandkids and has a penchant for ham (in sandwhich form) and her garden (her name for the Mormon Mountains). While volunteering for wilderness she has also devoted herself to the protection of Nevada's rich archaelogical heritage and is a Site Steward for the BLM, working to catalogue and police the rich cultural sites of southern Nevada. Nancy is a pretty good birder, (she can spell Phainopepla), and is fearless enough to come back to DC to advocate for wilderness in Clark and Lincoln Counties AND eat a full Ethiopean meal! Nancy will be working closely with Nancy Beecher and the rest of our team to see that Gold Butte is given the conservation attention that it so richly deserves. Mrs. Hall has never been to the Black Rock Desert, which puts it at the top of her "To do" list for Ne-vada. Rumor has it that she has never seen the Pacific Ocean, which is either a testament to a bad sense of direction (which she did not bring up in the interview), or it might derive from the fact that she is a reformed Florida "beach bum". Please help us welcome Nancy to NWP and if you are ever in the far eastern reaches of Clark County and need some directions in Gold Butte or the Mormon Mountains, give us a call, we now have a not-so secret weapon on the team!

Nancy Hall Gold Butte Organizer

Example of parallel two tracks in the Gold Butte Area.

Page 5 www.wildnevada.org Spring 2006

NWP Fundraising Update from Mackenzie

Keep your eyes posted for the July/August addition of the Reno Magazine. Featured will be Cameron Johnson and myself, repre-senting the Nevada Wilderness Project! We were asked to model ‘eco-friendly’ clothing in exchange for a bit of publicity for our work. Just one more glamorous aspect of our jobs! Next time you see Cam-eron out at a tabling event or in the field, be sure to comment on his high cheek bones and the new sway in his step. Or ask me how I have been able to fend off the paparazzi! Don’t worry; we won’t let

our fame lessen our commitment to the land!

- Mackenzie Banta, Development Director

St. Patrick’s Day House Party The Nevada Wilderness Project helped to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with the Durney ladies at a fund-raising house party. Thank you Martha, Sarah and Carmen Durney for opening up your home to us and helping support our work. Part of our success as an organization is our ability to share out passion with new people; by telling our story and talking one-on-one with folks. House parties are a wonderful, in-formal event our members can host to help us strengthen our work. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in hosting an event via email, mackenzie.banta@wildnevada.org.

In effort to inject a little more hu-mor into our daily lives, we’re ask-ing people to submit captions for our photos. To the right you’ll find a photo, submit the winning caption and receive prize as well as your name and caption in print in the fol-lowing newsletter. Please email submissions to cameron.johnson@wildnevada.org.

Enjoy!

Caption Contest!

and the political (respected on both sides of the aisle in DC and an astute observer of human behavior). And as those who know him well will tell you, he is sneaky funny! Project staff and volunteers cherish the memories of Kevin’s dry wit and healthy sense of the absurd, and how enjoyable they made the average workday. For those who do not know him personally, that is him in the bathtub up above.

On a personal note, I am grateful for Kevin’s friendship over the years. I marvel at my good fortune to have stumbled upon a passionate and purposeful friendship whose insights, perspective, and humor have made the world (and this corner of it) a better place. I know that Nevada is in his blood, and he’ll find a way to stay connected to the people and landscape for which he worked so hard.

Kevin’s new professional pursuits allow him to use some different tools on different conservation challenges closer to his home in Bethesda, MD, where he and his wife Laura have lived since leaving Nevada in 2002. We wish them both an abundance of everything Kevin has given us in the last seven years—good luck, much laughter, healthy perspective, and success wherever life’s journey takes them.

Robert and Julia Payne of Reno are our first winners!

Doggone Wild!

Your caption here

HELP US PROTECT YOUR WILDERNESS

Join NWP staff and volunteers on trips to potential wilderness areas! You can see beautiful places and help protect them at the same time by writing letters and plugging in to our ef-

forts in a way that’s interesting and fun. All outings are weather permitting. Please log on to www.wildnevada.org for more information.

NEVADA WILDERNESS CALENDAR WILDERNESS VALUES TRIPS & EVENTS

It’s easy to help… Cut out this form and mail it to: NV Wilderness Project, 8550 White Fir St; Reno, NV 89523

Enclosed is my donation of: I would like to make a recurring donation:

Monthly

Every 3 months

Annually

$25.00

$50.00

$100.00

$250.00

$500.00

Other Amount: ____________

Comments:

Name Phone Number

Address

Email address

City State Zip

Please include check or money or-der payable to: Nevada Wilderness Project.

For secure credit card transactions, please visit

http://www.wildnevada.org

Please join us for our monthly volunteer night at

Reno’s Great Basin Brewery

(www.greatbasinbrewingco.com)

May 16th, 6-8pm

June 20th, 6-8pm July 18th, 6-8pm

Northern Nevada Events - May 17th —Wilderness Slide Show in Carson City Join NWP for a fun and exotic tour of Nevada’s wildest places. Learn what efforts are being taken to protect places in the Great Basin as wilderness and how you can become involved! The show begins at 7:30 at Comma Coffee, 312 S. Carson St., Carson City

May 20th— Wilderness Values Trip to Bald Mountain, Lyon Co. June 2-3— Wilderness Values Trip on the East Walker River, Lyon Co. This is a very popular trip and space is limited. If interested please contact Cameron at cameron.johnson@wildnevada.org

June 15th— Volunteer Opportunity at the Sparks Farmer’s Market June 24th– Wilderness Values Trip to East Sister Peak, Lyon Co.

Southern Nevada Events - Please contact Nancy Hall at nancy.hall@wildnevada.org if interested.

May 20th— Wilderness Values Trip to the Mudd Hills May 24th— Wilderness Values Trip to Mudd Hills June 17th— Wildernes Values Trip to Gold Butte June 24h— Wilderness Values Trip to the Virgin Mountains

Photo © Kristie Connolly

Cover Photo by Howard Booth

Printed on recycled paper