Can we bring back horny toads?
It's a good question.
"They used to be everywhere."
"You could collect them by the shoebox-full."
Boy scouts traded them at jamborees. Kids strapped plastic toy cowboys to their backs and had "bull-riding" contests. That's what people who saw lots of them said about them. All of that continued until about the 1970s...(as demonstrated in this Fort Worth tv news clip from 1977...)
The noticeable disappearance of horned toads coincided with the disappearances of other wild, grassland species, like these prairie dogs that were living at the intersection of East Loop 820 and Martin Luther King Jr Freeway in Fort Worth...
...that is, until their prairie habitat was replaced with an industrial park...
We don't know if the relocated prairie dogs survived but attempts from Texas Parks & Wildlife biologists show that most relocated prairie dog colonies don't result in happy endings for the animals. Historical aerial & satellite imagery of the prairie dog town in Fort Worth reveal the fate of their prairie habitat. And by 1979, the prairie dog town was paved over.
Today, where the prairie dog town used to be there are businesses with names like "Junk King" and "AutoNation Collision Center" in its stead... And the last known prairie dogs in Tarrant County (at the Fort Worth Nature Center) died off in 2016...
Other prairie species also succumbed to land use changes, such as the diverse native prairie bunchgrasses themselves. And often, it was because they were plowed up and replaced with a single crop of aggressive & non-native grasses such as Coastal Bermudagrass from Africa. This news clipping from the Cotulla (Texas) Record newspaper, printed in April 1950, highlights the fact that so-called "improved" exotic pasture grasses such as Coastal Bermudagrass were selling so fast that they couldn't keep supplies in stock. This one grass species that Texas agriculturists used to displace the native Texas grasses with has been attributed to the disappearance of bobwhite quails and horned lizards in the ecoregions of East Texas.
Even Texas Horned Lizards' food was displaced. This time, by poisoning. From 1962 - 1971, the U.S. Department of Agriculture dropped a pesticide called Mirex via airplanes over 30 million acres in the southeastern USA, including Texas, and the spraying continued until Mirex was banned by the EPA in 1978. The stated purpose for aerial application of Mirex was purportedly in response to the invasion of Red Imported Fire Ants that eventually entered southeast Texas in the late 1950s. Environmental scientists were alarmed by its usage, likening the spraying of Mirex to "dropping nuclear bombs on pickpockets" or decapitating oneself to cure a head cold. The problem was that the pesticide not only failed to kill off fire ants, in spite of the USDA's assurances that it would, but that Mirex was indiscriminate, killing off native ant & termite species that horned lizards need to eat, like Seed Harvester Ants and Grass Harvester Termites.
When you consider that humans have been chipping away at the integrity of horned lizards' prairie habitat with such disturbances as the abovementioned—i.e. urban development, the plowing up of native grasslands, the removal of keystone species of their community (like wild bison, wolves, pocket gophers, and prairie dogs), exotic grass introduction, other invasive species introductions, broadcasting pesticides—all along the I-35 corridor...is it any wonder that horned lizards' geographic distribution has also been chipping away?
You can see how their range has been receding westward compared to historic range records...
And folks like us who grew up in places like Galveston and Cleburne can look at county records of horned lizard sightings and clearly see that horned lizards started disappearing from these places in the 1960s and 1970s...
...which coincides perfectly with the timing of those aforementioned disturbances against the prairie that we humans have wrought throughout the twentieth century. ...As you can see in the far-right column showing the year found, all of these horned lizard sighting records show that specimens were no longer observed with any regularity after the 1960s in Cleburne and Galveston, and this pattern holds true for practically all areas along, and east of, the I-35 corridor in Texas and Oklahoma.
So, what can we do?
Well, the answer should be clear...
We can rebuild their prairie homes and wild communities.
Even gazing upon a Horny Toad teaches us what to do...
...because they look like they're molded from the prairie patch that they're born on.
From the white stripe running down their back mimicking sun-bleached prairie grass stems to their body colors matching the colors of local soil exposed between bunchgrass clumps, Texas Horned Lizards give us clues on how we can reassemble the natural diorama in which they belong.
The pieces to this prairie jigsaw puzzle are still out there. But, they're scattered.
There are Seed Harvester Ants gathering prairie grass seeds like these Pogonomyrmex barbatus in the western Texas Hill Country....
There are even places where Harvester Ants live among other movers & shakers of the prairie like these American Bison and Black-tailed Prairie Dogs in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma... But even in these places, Texas Horned Lizards are becoming rare.
Because they are on tiny islands of native wildness surrounded by vast oceans of non-native tameness. Wild tares among domesticated wheat, if you will, and the wild ones are in danger of being cast out forever.
It's clear that we have to reconnect the pieces. Nature is calling for us to put it right, and Rehorning Texas is here to help you in our mutual quest of answering that call.
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