Bill Meredith
“Time’s fun when you’re having
flies.”
…Kermit the Frog
For reasons that defy logic, I am fascinated by lists of things and have always
been a compulsive record-keeper. Many of these records are related to hobbies
like birdwatching and gardening…dates of the first house wrens, or the last
killing frost…but most are explainable only as habits left over from a career
spent studying ecology. Among these arcania is a list of dates when I heard the
first spring peepers. This year it was March 27, nearly three weeks later than
usual.
Spring peepers, unlike children; are
usually heard but not seen. They are miniature frogs, an inch or so long, light
tan in color with a brown X-shaped pattern on their back. They are in the
tree-frog family, and have tiny suction cups on the ends of their toes which
enable them to climb up vertical surfaces. Like all frogs at this latitude,
they burrow into the mud and hibernate all winter; they usually emerge in the
first week of March if it isn’t too cold. The males wake up in an amorous mood,
and immediately begin singing to attract mates. For such small creatures, they
are remarkably noisy; you can hear them from distances of several hundred
yards. However, when you get close to them they go quiet, so you rarely see
them unless you are willing to sit quietly in a cold, wet place until they
start singing again. When we were kids we used to catch them and put them in
gallon lard buckets; after a while they would begin singing and the bucket
would act as a megaphone, making them sound even louder.
I was worried about the peepers this
spring because of last year’s drought. Our average annual rainfall in
Emmitsburg is a bit over 45 inches, but last year we only received about 28
inches. There were periods in March, July and September when we went several
weeks without rain. Contrary to Kermit’s ingenious Spoonerism, those times were
not fun; the dry spring meant poor breeding success, the dry summer was not
good growing conditions for the young, and the dry fall required them to enter
hibernation early with meager fat reserves to live on. This spring there seem
to be fewer of them singing than usual.
My education about frogs began early in
childhood. My Uncle Fay, who loved to tease us, had a goldfish pond in his
yard, and there were always frogs around it. He told me I would get warts if I
touched a frog, so if I wanted to catch one I should put salt on its tail and
then I could pick it up with a stick. This puzzled me greatly because none of
the frogs seemed to have tails; he let me take the salt shaker out to the pond
in case I might see one, but I never could get close enough. When I got to
school I learned that frogs and toads were amphibians and that they went
through a tadpole stage during which, for a short time, they had both legs and
tails; but by that time I knew they didn’t cause warts. We raised some in an
aquarium, but the teacher wouldn’t let us test the salt technique for catching
them.
In times of normal rainfall the ground is
quite wet in our back yard, so in years past we were treated to a symphony of
frog songs…or a cacophony, depending on your taste in such music. Also, there
is a pond in the field off to the southwest, and when we first moved here it
was a splendid habitat for frogs and toads. I identified at least six species
of frogs and toads there, in addition to the peepers. I recall one evening in
the late ‘60s when the bullfrogs were especially loud and I walked to the pond
to see them. The pond was full of lily pads; every pad seemed to have a frog on
it, and they were all croaking at the top of their voices. The songs, of
course, were not just a matter of good fellowship; it was the peak of the
mating season, and you could almost see an aura of testosterone rising from the
pond. A frog’s brain is limited in the best of circumstances, and in conditions
like that they sometimes lose track of what is going on around them. I saw one
hapless bullfrog Romeo continuing to sing lustily while being swallowed, rear
end first, by one of his larger rivals. It was an image that still comes back
to me when I hear someone say he has a frog in his throat.
No one seems to know when or why the pond
was made; my guess is that it was dug with horse-drawn plows and scoops
sometime in the 1800s. The oldest local residents say it has always been there;
some still remember skating on it in the winter, cutting ice from it to store
in icehouses for summer use, and swimming or playing in it during the summer
months. And some still tell tales of gigging for bullfrogs that originally may
have been based on real experiences but have been embellished by countless re-tellings
in barber shops and bars until they would be worthy rivals of Mark Twain’s
“Jumping Frog” story. But, like so many once-rich habitats, the pond isn’t what
it used to be. Since about 1970 the farmers who rent the surrounding fields
have been using heavier doses of fertilizer and pesticides, and these chemicals
wash into the pond with each rain. The worst episode occurred one summer in the
mid-70s when a helicopter was used to spray some kind of herbicide on the
field. All of the vegetation in the pond was killed, and there were no frogs
for the next couple of years. Eventually a few frogs and toads moved in from
other areas, and some of the vegetation was re-established from seeds blown on
the wind or carried by waterfowl; but populations have never returned to their
former levels. Springtime around the pond is a lot more silent than it used to
be.
The pond and its inhabitants are a
microcosm of the world. Populations of amphibians of all kinds are decreasing
everywhere. There are 19 species of frogs and toads in Maryland; 11 of them
occur in Frederick County. Three of them are officially listed as endangered
species, but in fact all of them are endangered. Their habitats are being
destroyed on a large scale by development and agricultural practices. Even
ordinary homeowners must take some responsibility; frogs and toads do not
respond well to lawnmowers. And the stresses of toxic pesticides are compounded
by our increasingly unstable weather patterns; in the 167 years that records
have been kept, we have received less than 30 inches of rain only four times,
and two of them have been in this decade. The last songs of the spring peepers
may be a warning to us all.
Read other articles by Bill Meredith