The 2025 wet was long and it was heavy. Between December and March the Mitchell Plateau gauge recorded its second-wettest season in the eighteen years we have data for, and the access tracks did not open until the third week of April.
A late opening compresses the field season at both ends. We lost three of the eleven trapping weeks we had budgeted, which means the FY24/25 population estimate carries wider error bars than we would like. We are reporting it anyway, with the caveat attached, because a noisy number published honestly is more useful than a clean number published late.
The headline is that the core plateau population held. The estimate is 188 individuals against 201 the year before — a decline, but within the range we would expect from sampling variance alone. The toad front did not advance materially over the wet, which is the single most important sentence in this dispatch.
What did change is recruitment. We scanned fewer juveniles than in any season since 2019. A heavy wet is hard on a small, ground-denning carnivore, and the den-box network — see Issue 35 — exists in part to take the edge off exactly this. We will know by August whether the low juvenile count is a blip or the start of something we need to act on.