WEST GLACIER - Could it be that, after the raging and red-hot inferno, rising like a phoenix from the ashes is ... a toad?

"It's certainly something we need to think about," said Steve Corn. "These toads might actually be a fire-adapted species. When we suppress fire, we might be suppressing the toads."

Corn is a zoologist working for the U.S. Geological Survey at the Missoula-based Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute. His emerging theory that the beleaguered boreal toad might be adapted to thrive alongside wildfire is getting the attention of forest scientists for a couple of reasons.

First, it offers an unlikely addition to the cast of characters known to need fire in order to thrive. That toads, generally thought to like cool, damp hollows under logs, actually need scorching fire to survive is a strange and novel idea.

Second, and more importantly, Corn's theory is significant because it adds to the list of possible suspects in the mystery of why boreal toads have been croaking at an alarming rate throughout their Rocky Mountain range.

In Colorado, the boreal toad is almost gone in some places, and in Montana its numbers are thought to be dropping precipitously. Some scientists have blamed an exotic fungus known to attack the toads; others, an increase in ultraviolet light reaching the Earth and damaging the toad's gelatinous egg bundles. Still others point to pesticides, pollutants and habitat destruction.

Now, a century of fire suppression can be added to the list of probable causes for the toads' decline.

By choking forests with unnaturally thick growth, fire-suppression cuts off sunlight from prime toad breeding ponds. By scouring clear the underbrush and forest canopy, wildfire is opening the forest for the boreal toad, allowing patches of sunlight to warm the toads as they bask in the sun.

"It makes pretty good sense," Corn said. "They like to soak up the sun, like to bask in it. They like open areas with lots of light. A dense lodgepole forest is just not very good toad habitat."

But a dense lodgepole forest is exactly what covers much of the West these days, thanks in no small part to a century of fire suppression. For the past several years, Corn and a team of scientists have been working that lodgepole forest, finding the small seeps and wetlands where amphibians hang out, searching to see who's out there.

And until fire came through, the boreal toad just wasn't out there.

Since the late 1990s, Corn's teams had been surveying a corner of Glacier National Park, just inside the park's western entrance. Year after year, they dipped their nets into the ponds along the Camas Road, and year after year there was no sign of boreal toads.

Then, in the summer of 2001, the Moose Fire burned out of control across Corn's study area. A year later, boreal toads are breeding in a half dozen ponds.

The same toad explosion happened a couple years before in the area of the Anaconda Fire, located just to the northeast of the Moose Fire.

"Having the old data to compare to was critical," Corn said of his theory. "Unless you just happen to be studying an area before it burned, you'd have no way of knowing whether the toads had been there all along or whether they had just moved in. We were lucky that we already had pretty good data on these sites."

Joshua Kinser picked his way though a charred forest, decked out with all the high-tech scientific gear needed to collect data on amphibians. He had his rubber boots, a net that looked suspiciously like a child's butterfly net, a notebook and a USGS ballcap to block the sun.

Behind the volunteer field technician walked Blake Hossack, a USGS zoologist and project leader in the search for Glacier Park's amphibians.

As they made their way through the burn, Hossack explained the bizarre metamorphosis that is a toad's life. The eggs, planted in black bundles under shallow ponds, pull in oxygen from the water around them. When the tadpoles emerge, they breath through external gills for a few days before developing internal gills.

Lungs slowly develop, and the long-tailed tadpoles begin to surface, gulping at the air above. Then come rear legs, bulging eyes, a changing mouth for a changing diet. The "beak" used for nibbling algae gives way to a toady mouth for eating insects.

Within a couple months, they are ready to leave the water, although the process still is not entirely complete - "they're still dragging a little bit of tail," Hossack said.

Before emerging, the bundles of black eggs soak up the sun in shallow water. Afterward, family groups of black tadpoles stick together, presumably to better bask. And as adults, the boreal toads like to perch on a hot rock in the heat of the day, letting the sun warm their bumpy backs.

By the end of this summer, Hossack and his helpers will have sampled more than 10,000 wetlands hoping to watch this cycle in action.

"And after all this time," he said, "we still can't predict where they'll be, except that it will be open."

Open, just like in this year-old burn, where even the weedy wetlands were cooked clean of shadowy plants.

At about half the sites, they find long-toed salamanders. At about a quarter, they find the Columbia spotted frog. But the boreal toad turns up at just 5 percent of sites," which concerns us," Corn said, "because that seems lower than it should be. Anecdotally, the toads have always been described as historically common and abundant."

What is abundant in this burn are all the well-known fire-adapted plants and animals that usually crop up after a fire.

Tiny lodgepole pine carpet the forest floor, the seeds cut loose from waxy, serotinous cones by the heat of the fire. Scattered among the pines are other "fire plants;" spirea and fireweed and arnica and dragontail mint and pine grass, which only flowers after a fire. Other plants, like the red-stemmed ceanothus and Bicknell's geranium, only appear in burns, either because they need the unfiltered sun to survive or because their hard seeds can only be opened by scorching heat.

Beetles move into trees killed or weakened by the blaze, and little-seen birds like the black-backed woodpecker move in to eat the beetles.

Scientists have long understood that these species need fire to thrive. Now, perhaps, they will add the warty boreal toad to the list.

The toads already are distinguished for their surprising choice of habitat, living as high as 11,000 feet, far above treeline among the alpine rocks.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife has listed them as endangered, and the southern population of mountain toads is a candidate for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Scientists believe the thousands of breeding populations that existed just a few decades back have shrunk to a few hundred.

The supposed reasons for the decline -- including climate change and ultraviolet light and mining and logging and development and introduced fish and disease -- have long been studied. But until now, no one made the connection between toads and fire.

"This is brand-new," Corn said. "No one has ever really studied this angle."

It was sheer luck that his team was working in an area that happened to burn, he said, "and one of the interesting things that showed up right away was the arrival of the toads. We were surprised by the magnitude of the invasion."

Corn's old data will be compared with current data being collected this summer, he said, and then will be analyzed in the context of a bigger project exploring toads' relationship to fire in the Bitterroot Valley and Idaho.

"We want to know the effects of fire suppression over the last century," he said. "It's something we need to start thinking about in terms of future forest management."

Very little is known about how fire impacts most species, he said, and there may be other animals, like the toad, that have more in common with the mythical and majestic phoenix than would at first be imagined.