G’town board OKs plan for treatment plant upgrade

By NANCY JANE KERN

OUR FIRST SPRING AMPHIBIAN to come to mind is the “peeper,” but it is not necessarily the first to present itself to us, and this other little frog can be just as loud in a much less musical way. This is the brown, 3” long white-bellied wood frog with its easily recognized black bandit mask and I heard a few yesterday. Its call has been described as a quack, bark or croak, and males begin calling for females as soon as they emerge from the leaf mold of the damp forest or from under rocks or logs where they lay buried for the winter.

They are often dug in above the frost line and just thaw out without any harm done. I have often heard them call before the peepers and sometimes when the ground still has patches of snow. They are tough little guys and very intent on getting out and into their reproductive mode. I fondly remember the first time I saw them mating and laying eggs in a shallow pool of water to the west of our farmhouse in what we called “Tiger’s lot.”

This was my first horse’s name and was an untillable bit of marshy, rocky pasture reserved for our horses. It was a dark spring evening and my mother had been telling us about the signs of spring for several weeks. She heard the wood frogs calling and said come on, I want to show you something. So down we went across the pasture with a flashlight and quietly crept up on this small pool. It was damp, but we lay on our stomachs and quietly watched the abundant activity and listened to the deafening and enthusiastic calls. Frogs were swimming and hopping everywhere it seemed, and many were hooking up with mates. Sometimes there were two or three males attached to the back of one female. They grab onto any other frog they see and hug them, in what is called amplexus. They can’t recognize what sex frog they have found until this hug. If it is a female they can feel the fat egg-filled body. If it is another male, this frog croaks and objects until released.

When the female has been fertilized, she lays gelatinous masses of about 1,000 eggs often attached to a submerged branch. It was an impressive sight that I never forgot, and we frequently checked the pool in daylight to see how the eggs were progressing until they hatched and grew into tadpoles, and then adult frogs.

This amazing experience kept me interested in frogs and other amphibians for life. I passed on my enthusiasm for these creatures to my nieces and nephews and many students I had in my biology classes. A favorite pastime on warm, wet evenings was to take the family children out on quiet back roads near marshy areas to look for frogs. Frogs like to sit on the roads because they hold the heat of the day and there, they can catch insects. When we found frogs, I would stop the car and the kids would jump out with their strong paper bags and catch as many frogs as they could. One evening we had a large collection, and the 3 children ran into their house to show their parents, and there was their great-grandmother, the very “proper” one, from Rhode Island. Before I could stop them (ages about 6-10) they ran screaming Grandma, Grandma “Look what we have!” They thrust the open bags toward her, and she peeped in. Then she looked at me.

I will never forget that look, the “what have you done to these children” look. No one said a word and we all got outside very quickly and examined and identified our catch, did some admiring of the huge bullfrogs, and released them into the pond below the house.

Now their children are learning about our local amphibians and continuing the ritual. It takes so little to instill curiosity in children about the life around us and to get them to appreciate all these wonderful creatures. It lasts a lifetime and helps them think of how we can work to preserve them, and it establishes concern for our environment. If you have some bored children, consider getting out on one of these warm, damp evenings and see what they can find. It is a very rewarding experience for all, and with a little discussion and education ahead of time no frogs, salamanders, or other creatures need be harmed.

To learn more go to: Amphibian Migrations And Road Crossings – NYDEC