“Dobra žaba” means good frog in Croatian. This project was in the head of the Kompostalja volunteers since October, and it became a concrete action in the village of Švica. This project came from one idea : the frog are tasty (French point of view) but as well menaced in all europe. Indeed, according to the IUCN (the International Union for the Conservation of Nature) diagnostic, one third of the amphibians species are in danger of extinction. This is a bad news for the frog eaters and it means that human’s activities have a strong negative impact on those animals … Desperated by this bad news, we wanted to save all the amphibians of the world but first we’ve decided to begin in the village of Švica, near Kuterevo. There, peoples know that a lot of frogs die every year because of human’s activity and mainly because of car’s traffic.  For our saving actions, we needed some help and we searched for it in the city of Otočac. Here we founded the motivated support of Goran Bukovac and several volonteers from srednja škola!

In order to avoid that amphibians dies on road, we’ve installed a protection system of 80 meters.

In our buckets and on the roads of Švica, we found an interesting diversity of 4 species.

Triturus alpestris

Rana dalmatina

Hyla arborea

Bufo bufo

We saved, with this system, only twenty amphibians. This few number show first that not a lot of frogs crossed roads this year but as well that 80 m of nets is not enough to have a concrete impact against the mortality on the road. But this spring of actions had the benefit to sensibilisate people about the frog protection: thanks to the newspaper “Novi list” the information spread until Rijeka ! The next step of the project is to organize some comunication event to continue to sensibilise people about the impact of human activities on frog population. For this we are planning to make workshop in schools, presentation in the library of Otočac and interactive stand during the market day For the benefits of the frogs, we hope that the project will be continued the next year, in bigger proportions, in order to propose a real protection plan for the frogs of Švica! In this way the future of the project is in the hand of the volunteers of Otočac or who knows, of the Kuterevo team of the next year !

Croa croa,

Millo and Dan