A lot has happened here in ‘Frog Holler’ since I posted Funky Frogs. Plenty of matching and hatching, but also, sadly, some dispatching. On the matching front: the wood frogs have long since ceased their wacky quacks. A few lonely bachelor peepers are still hoping for an invite to the mating dance, but I’d say their chances are pretty slim at this late date. Last – but not least – to join the mating game were the green frogs. These big fellas show up late to the pond party and then raise a ruckus. Hmm … reminds me of some people I know.

Green frogs are by far the biggest frogs in this pond and are (surprise!) green. Their call is a percussive ‘gonk’ that is often compared to a banjo twang. Unlike chorus frogs such as peepers, green frogs are more soloists, but sometimes a gang gets gonking back and forth across the water and it gets rather loud. Due to their size, these frogs are quite startling to encounter on pond walks. They tend to be less skittish than their smaller cousins, being literally ‘a big frog in a small pond’.

Even the green-frog tadpoles are big – they take two years to mature and in their second year look positively freaky, a kind of FrankenFrog with a full-sized frog-head attached to a tadpole-tail but no torso. Seeing dozens of these scatter in the shallows is a strange sight indeed.

The two species I see most often are similar in appearance and mating calls: pickerel frogs and leopard frogs. Both tend to be ‘seen and not heard’ – at least by human ears – as their softer calls are drowned out by the loud crowd. The calls have been likened to a soft snore but I’ve heard them on quiet May afternoons and, frankly, it sounds to me more like a fart. A frog fart. Again, frogs are just funny.

I see pickerel and leopard frogs in a range of sizes, from super-cute wee ones to mature adults (2-3 years old). They like to sunbathe at the pond’s edge and they usually sense me before I see them. This lumbering giant startles them – perhaps my looming shadow, or the tremor from my seismic footfall. They leap into the water – boing! – and make me jump. Off they go, diving for cover, hiding under the aquatic plants or burrowing into the silty debris until the giant moves on.

On pond perambulations in late May I began to see the results of all that quacking, peeping, croaking, twanging and trilling. Gobs and gobs of jellied egg blobs in the water. Dozens of round eggs are clumped into a jellied mass and attached to a submerged twig. Each egg holds a single visible embryo, wriggling around and feeding on algae that colours the eggs green. Apart from the tiny peeper eggs I can’t tell one blob from another. Or is it even a frog blob? The Holler is also home to newts and salamanders, who are so amazing they will be featured in a future blog.

As May turned to June the water level in the pond dropped dramatically. This is an annual event; the pond fills to overflowing as related in Spring Ditty “the snow melt grows the pond into a lake” and then gradually lowers as the water drains into the permeable glacial till. But last winter was a weird one (see April and the Albedo Effect) and the snow melted a month early. We are feeling the impact of that now, with very low water levels. Last June I was swimming in my pond. (Fancy folk swim with dolphins – I swim with frogs!). Not a hope of that this year. By mid-June the pond was down to levels more typical in mid-summer.

As the pond drops, some egg blobs become stranded. Sentimental as I am, I pick them up and toss the whole blob into deeper water. The thing is, I can see the wee embryos wriggling around inside the eggs and I just can’t let them melt into mush. So I scoop and toss, scoop and toss. I have a history of this sort of thing. When I was a child my best friend and I embarked on similar quixotic endeavors, such as putting earthworms, stranded on sidewalks by heavy rains, back on the grass.

In addition to the egg-glob toss, I often do a pollywog bucket brigade. As the pond drops the deeper areas separate from some shallower pools. A pool may dry out while still teeming with tadpoles who haven’t had time to metamorphose. Without water, they die. So I scoop wiggly pollywogs into a bucket, ferry them over the high ground, and release them into deeper parts of the pond. I don’t think there’s an ecological issue with this – it’s all one body of water much of the year and is rejoined in summer if a post-tropical storm dumps torrential rains.

But then again, would the overall frog population be better off without my meddling? After all, frogs have evolved a successful reproductive strategy. Large mammals have few young but tend to them and fiercely protect them until maturity: 1 year for moose, 2 years for bears, 32 years for modern humans (Hee hee). But frogs, like so many organisms, play the odds game. Lay oodles of eggs and swim away.

Almost all those offspring will be eaten or die somehow before they reach sexual maturity, but odds are that a few will survive long enough to keep the species going. One spring, a couple of years on, those few survivors will thaw out or emerge from the mud. The surviving males will peep and quack and croak and trill and twang. The surviving females will select a mate and lay gobs and gobs of egg blobs. And the cycle of life and death will continue.

Note: At no time did this reproductive process require a human being tossing egg blobs or bucketing pollywogs. But as I wrote in Hoots in the Holler, nature isn’t all flowers and rainbows. Natural selection has resulted in an astonishing array of organisms but it is not a kindly process. I am trying to learn to accept nature as it is, not as I would wish it to be. To accept these deaths as being as crucial to the cycle as the surge of new life that so delights me every spring. But it is a difficult lesson to learn and I struggle.

I once heard a lecture by the late, great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. He explained the role of ‘contingency’ in evolution and gave the example of a successful species going extinct because its pond habitat dries up. And while frogs and other amphibians are in trouble globally, the frogs in the Holler are not about to go extinct because a shallow pool dries up. It is not the scientist in me that is driven to toss egg blobs and bucket pollywogs – it is the sentimentalist. I fret over these wee creatures like a mother, but not like a mother frog. The frog mamas are lounging on lily pads while I run around rescuing stranded eggs and stranded tads. It is somewhat silly, perhaps futile, and certainly more emotional that rational. And that, of course, is why it is so very human.

Sue McKay Miller
June 29, 2021