Woodhouse's ToadAnaxyrus woodhousii

Northeast of Fredericksburg, Texas is a narrow little road that loops through some pretty rocky canyon areas.  It is all private land, but it is a pretty drive and very popular during wildflower season.   My interest in the area, of course, is the potential for seeing reptiles and amphibians that are hard to find other areas in the hill country of Texas.

They received 2-3 inches of rain earlier this week so I thought I would make a drive up there to see if I could find some hill country frogs like Strecker's Chorus Frogs or possibly Barking Frogs calling.   I was surprised to find a much more widespread species that I had never seen in the area before - Woodhouse's Toad (Anaxyrus woodhousii)!

Woodhouse's Toad (Anaxyrus woodhousii)
Burleson County, Texas

Woodhouse's Toad is a toad of the Great Plains and desert Southwest.  However it does occur into east-central Texas and down into the southern tip of the state. Here is the documented range of Woodhouse's Toad (and the closely related Fowler's Toad) in Texas.  

You can see that the documented range of Woodhouse's Toad is quite patchy.  In some areas of this range they are very common and in others they are quite rare.  In the Panhandle they are not uncommon and in north(central) Texas they are reported pretty frequently.  But over most of their range in the middle part of the state they are not encountered very frequently if at all anymore.  They have disappeared in areas of the state where they used to be the most common toad.  

To reinforce this point, here is a map of all of the records from the Inaturalist Herps of Texas project.  There are records in this project going back 30+ years and a lot of recent records for all over the state, but Woodhouse's Toad is not being reported from areas other than the Panhandle, north-central Texas, and a few records from Padre Island.  The dots in central Texas represent the recordings you hear here, the spot in east Central TX represents the one in the photo above from 20 years ago and there have been a few sightings Padre Island and the Midland area.   But else where it appears to have disappeared?  When I lived in far west Texas (El Paso), we saw these toads frequently in the agricultural areas along the river after seasonal rains.  People who live in the area now say they appear to be gone?

This could be a result of the destruction of the Blackland Prairie and similar grassland habitats in these areas or some other unknown reason, but it is concerning.

When I finally got a recording of this species in 2016, I had spent considerable time in this particular area of Central Texas and never seen a Woodhouse's Toad.   On this night I saw 3 and heard one distant calling individual.  The recording isn't very good since it was a distance away and I had to filter out several other species (Incilius nebulifer, Lithobates berlandieri, Acris blanchardi) to make the Woodhouse's audible, but it is at least my first Woodhouse's Toad recording and another species off my Texas Recording Lifelist.

The call of the Woodhouse's Toad is a nasal trill.  You can hear it here above the background of the other species.




Hopefully I will be able to get a better recording for this species this summer, but for now its off my list of Texas misses at least. - done - In 2018 I was able to visit the same location and get a better recording for this species.

Woodhouse's Toad Call

The call of this species is very similar to the call of its sister species, the Fowler's Toad (Anaxyrus fowleri).  Fowler's Toad and Woodhouse's Toad used to be considered the same species.
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© Chris Harrison 2016 & 2018