f Rebecca Browne had a bumper sticker it would probably say ?I break for toads?. In February Ms Browne, a trust manager, was one of several Bermudians at HSBC Bank of Bermuda who were picked for the HSBC Environmental Fellowship programme.

As part of this programme HSBC sends a number of its employees from around the world to volunteer with research projects associated with the Earthwatch Institute, the Botanic Gardens Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund. The trip is paid for by HSBC and the employees do not lose vacation time.

Ms Browne was sent to Australia to help with a frog monitoring project.

?I am a toad fan,? she said, ?but I am not a toad freak. One of the girls that was on this trip had toad pajamas, toad wallet, toad pen. She kept pet toads. I am not quite there. I have always stopped in the street to make sure I don?t squash toads. I look after them as best I can.?

Ms Browne is a follower of Dr. Jamie Bacon who is studying the declining toad population in Bermuda. Amphibians worldwide are in decline and scientists are trying to figure out why.

?Jamie Bacon has been keeping watch over our toads,? said Ms Browne. ?If you care about the creatures and you realise their importance then you are going to put a lot more effort into maintaining habitats for them.?

So Ms Browne was thrilled to be picked for a programme called ?Australia?s Vanishing Frogs?.

?I really wanted this particular one,? she said. ?There are many to choose from and you don?t get to select where you go. I really felt when I saw this expedition that it might help me a great deal here with our research. It definitely has. It has been an eye opener in a lot of ways.?

In Bermuda, one of the concerns is the disappearing cane toad (bufo marinus). This is a species that was introduced to keep the bugs down in Bermuda. Ms Browne found that in Australia it is a concern for just the opposite reason.

?I discovered when I got over to Australia that the cane toad was introduced to help them with their sugar cane beetles and it has become a real problem because the cane toad is eating everything,? she said. ?They are very adaptable. In Australia, the authorities produce a little flyer so that people are aware of the cane toad, but if they find him they are supposed to turn them in or destroy them. They are a huge threat to wildlife in Australia.?

In Australia, Ms Browne was researching mixophyes frogs, an endemic species that includes the great barred frog. This frog is so called because it has bars on its legs. It is smaller than a cane toad but larger than a tree frog and it is endangered.

The group was lead by Dr. Michael Mahoney. They travelled all throughout New South Wales studying the frog population.

?We started in New Castle and we went to a world heritage rain forest preserve,? said Ms Browne. ?Dr. Mahoney spends all of his free time when he is not raising his children and lecturing at the University of New Castle, travelling hundreds and hundreds of miles. We went all the way up to Queensland and then back. We went in two four wheel jeeps.?

The group learned how to pack and unpack very quickly. They stayed in one camp for two or three days and it would be a four to five hour drive between campsites . When they arrived Dr. Mahoney would give them a talk and they would have a few hours in the afternoon to go for a walk or take a swim. Most of the research was done at night.

?We could go and search for these frogs in a stream,? she said. ?One of the people in the stream could make the call of the great barred toad. It was like ?whop, whop?. He could do it really, really well. The frogs really liked his rendition. They would call back.?

The volunteer researchers wore head lamps.

They would shine their light into the trees, bushes and along the water. They could identify a frog from the orangey glow given off by its eyes. Unfortunately, spider eyes also have the same glow.

?You learn how to differentiate between the spiders and the frogs,? she said.

?Then once you locate the eye shine, one person stays focused on the frog so you can see him, and someone comes up with a bag over their hands to avoid contaminating the frogs in anyway.?

The frogs were then checked to see if they had been captured before. If they had their new measurements were noted down. If they hadn?t been captured before they were microchipped.

?You mark exactly where he was and put him back in the exact place where you found him,? Ms Browne said.

?The cool thing was that we found that a lot of the frogs within one or two feet of where they had last been captured. Some of them have been there for years, usually the males.

?Sometimes we?d catch 50 to 70 frogs a night, sometimes it was only 30.?

For another species of frog being studied, the group had to locate where the frog was buried in the earth in the dark.

?You had to listen very carefully because that particular frog buried itself in the dirt in the leaf litter,? she said. ?We didn?t have anyone who could make his call, so we had a recording on a tape player that we had to carry around.

?The frog will respond to recordings of his call because he thinks it is a male.

?We?d have to do a triangulation to find him. Three people would form a triangle around the sound.

?All would bend down to listen to where the sound was coming from.

?Where the three crossed was where he was. You have to move the leaf litter away. I couldn?t see a thing.?

Ms Browne was particularly pleased that Dr. Mahoney would take the time every couple of days to talk about the worldwide frog situation.

?Dr. Mahoney took the time every third day or so to sit us down and talk to us for an hour and a half about the declining frogs in Australia and around the world,? she said.

?There is a problem worldwide, not just in Australia.?

Scientists think they have identified a fungus called the chytrid fungus that has been killing frogs.?

?This fungus appears in frogs around the world almost at a certain elevation, and certain types of frogs,? she said.

?Pond frogs have been severely affected. They don?t know how it kills frogs, but it is very, very quick in the destruction.

?There have been a few frogs like the mixophyes that have managed to not die from it.

?The research being conducted is to find out what they have that will stop them from dying and to study other frogs that may have survived and in doing so figure out how we can stop it from spreading.

?It is a huge issue for amphibians around the world.

The problem is huge, much bigger than I realised.?

Ms Browne said there is a frog in Australia that was discovered in 1973 called the gastric brooding frog.

This strange frog ingested its own fertilised eggs, stopped its digestive system and looked after its eggs.

When they were ready for the big world, it would regurgitate the baby frogs.

?It was discovered one year and within three years they only had fifty left in the world,? said Ms Browne.

?They were dying left right and centre and they couldn?t figure out what was killing them, and they are now extinct.

?There are no more. That is how this disease was taking hold.?

She said it is a shame that more Bermudians don?t look on toads more fondly.

?The cane toad in Bermuda is doing an awesome job of keeping the bugs down,? she said.

?I think we are really lucky in Bermuda.

?If you go to the east coast of the United States and try to sit out at night it is pretty impossible to do.

?You get bitten by mosquitoes and everything else.?

People who participate in the HSBC nature programme are given a certain amount of money at the end of it to start their own programmes or to contribute to existing ones in their communities.

?I am going to be working with the Bermuda Zoological Society and Dr. Jamie Bacon because I want to do something for school children,? Ms Browne said.

?The plight of the frogs and many creatures are subject to what our children do towards conservation in the future.

?If they don?t think it is very important, or just something that happens, or don?t understand the tremendous value of conservation, then we are not going to save the species.

She said in Bermuda, researchers believe the amphibian problem is related to polluted groundwater.

?If the toads are dying what else is going to die?? she said.

?It is pretty worrying. We have already lost one of our species of whistling frogs.?