The Wilderness Committee is seeking immediate protection for 700 hectares of forest land in the West Kootenay following a new video showing countless western toads — a species of concern — crawling around 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 … 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. More than a million toadlets migrate at once, moving en mass from the lake across the highway 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.”

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.”

Greig Bethel, spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, said staff met with Nakusp and Area Community Forest, which has logging rights in the area, on Tuesday.

“Our understanding is that the company will not be logging until winter,” he said.

The company recently graded the Summit Lake Forest Service Road but not because logging is imminent and will not grade if toads are present, he said.

He added that “any use” of the road by the public could potentially harm toads.

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Photo: Summit Lake toads (ICandyFilms)