The Wilderness Committee is seeking immediate protection for 700 hectares of forest land in the West Kootenay following a new video showing heaps of western toads — a species of concern — crawling over logging equipment in the Summit Lake area near Nakusp.

“The toads are everywhere,” campaigner Gwen Barlee said in an interview Wednesday. “They’re in the cutblocks, on the road, on top of and under the tires of logging equipment. There’s no way in a million years that you can log in this habitat without killing toads left, right and centre.”

The B.C. government spent almost $200,000 to build a toad tunnel underneath Highway 6 for use by the toads. Protecting the migration route for toadlets later in summer leaving the lake is one thing, but one must also protect the area’s forest habitat in which they live for years, she said.

“It’s so asinine,” Barlee continued. “I scratch my head. They turn around after they build the tunnel and allow their critical habitat to be destroyed. It says, ‘this is how we do logging in B.C., a province with no endangered species legislation.’ It’s clear as day this is going to be a disaster.

“We need the B.C. government to step in right now.”

The Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations did not immediately comment.

More than a million toadlets migrate at once, moving en mass from the lake across Highway 6 to forested habitat where they live for four or five years before returning to the lake to breed.

The Ministry of Transportation has called the event “among the great wildlife migrations in the world” and a “natural phenomenon.”

Nakusp’s community-run forest operation is doing the logging.

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Photo: Summit Lake western toad held by biologist Wayne McCrory near road grading in toad habitat (ICandyFilms)