A childhood story about the disappearance of a Costa Rican toad sent Trevor Ritland on a quest. The Flagstaff writer and documentary filmmaker tells the story in his new book, The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species. He'll celebrate his book launch at Bright Side Bookshop tonight at 6pm.
Tell me when you first heard about the golden toad.
I first heard about the golden toad in a story from my dad when I was like five or six years old. He was a biology teacher. He had colleagues who had done work in Costa Rica, field work, and he came back home with this story of the golden toad, which was this bright orange endemic species known only to this one ridgeline habitat above the town of Monte Verde, Costa Rica. And he had a lot of stories… but that one really stuck with me. I think because the way the story ended was, “and this toad is extinct.”
So this story stuck with you so much that you actually went to Costa Rica to look for this toad?
My brother, Kyle and I, who wrote this book with me, really tried to approach it like a murder mystery. Because the story of the golden toad is really interesting;, it happened in the context of these broader amphibian declines that were happening globally. But in the case of the golden toad, there were no bodies to examine. They just kind of disappeared from one year to the next…. I would say, even if folks aren’t interested in—"I don’t care about frogs,” or things like that, it’s hopefully got a murder mystery angle, true crime angle to it.
I really like that. That’s a cool approach.
I should also mention, because I know she’s going to listen to this, that none of this would have been possible without my wife Priscilla. She’s Costan Rican and she lived in Monte Verde before I got there, and really helped make a lot of connections between the local people… And that’s one thing that became clear to us as we did this, is the local knowledge is the key.
So you were starting to hear stories from the local people about this idea that the golden toad maybe still existed, people had seen it more recently?
Yeah, exactly… And in 2021, so it took some time, ended up going back with Eladio Cruz, the last person who had seen this species…. to this spot that nobody had been back to in 30 years, three decades, to finally put that question to rest: is the golden toad still out there?
I’m not sure whether we should give away whether you found the toad or not, but maybe we can talk about—folks can go read your book to get that answer—
Yeah.
But maybe we can talk about what lessons do you think we can draw from living in this uncertainty about species that maybe have vanished, maybe not, we just don’t know very much about them?
I think the golden toad and its story gives us an opportunity to learn a lot of lessons. A few those are around the things that brought it to extinction, whether that’s pandemics or climate change, those things are top of mind for our species right now too….. Flagstaff is kind of the same story. We’re on the top of our mountain, too. What that means for a species like the golden toad is it doesn’t have anywhere to go when the conditions change around it. That same thing is true for humans in a lot of senses, in a lot of communities…. So I think we can look at what’s happening in cloud forest ecosystems and learn some lessons from that.
I think another lesson we can learn is that individual actions make a big difference. Right around the time of the golden toad’s extinction, this grassroots conversation ethic was taking hold in Monte Verde, and Eladio Cruz, the same guy who saw the last golden toads, was also the first person to donate his farming land to Children’s Eternal Rainforest for conservation…. So whether it’s doing your part to mitigate your climate change impact, or taking your kids out into the backyard and showing them a cool frog to get them interested in nature, I think one of the lessons we can learn is that individual actions matter a lot.
Trevor Ritland, thank you so much for speaking with me today.
Thank you, Melissa.
Tonight's Bright Side Bookshop event with Trevor Ritland starts at 6pm; free and open to the public; no RSVP required. Details here.
More about the book: https://diversionbooks.com/books/the-golden-toad/
