I doubt I need to elaborate to make you love these itty bitty frogs that, on a dark and steamy night some weeks ago, emerged from our pond and pipped away (my term; they just weren’t big enough to properly “hop”) into the unknown. They didn’t even mind me with my flashlight, sitting on the slate encouraging them to land on my hand, which some of them did without complaint. Yes, I petted them. I PETTED THEM. (With very gentle taps on the head. There wasn’t much to them.)
Gray tree frogs, which, as you can see, appear quite green early on, are happily suburban where I live. Last year and the year before, there was a single male–maybe even the one in the picture below–who found himself a divot in the pond’s biggest boulder that amplified his calls stunningly. From his little stone stage he croaked and croaked, and I felt sorry for him because, loud as he was, I never saw a female and didn’t notice any tadpoles as the summer went on.
It all changed this year. There were suddenly two males, and then three, four, maybe five. At night they’d take up the same positions, one here, one across the way, one in the tree above, one inside the rock, to play their favorite game: “Who can split the eardrum?” It was adorable at first. Now, I’m just so tired. Everyone on our street knows the frogs for their raspy (and somehow piercing) vibrato, and one night the man next door, who is a bit of an ass, if I may say so, placed a ladder against our shared fence and leaned way over onto our side, hanging above the pond wielding a broom like a sword–which he proceeded to slash at the water. When my husband lit him up with a flashlight, expecting to see a raccoon or some other wildlife splashing around, he explained himself thusly: “TOO! MUCH! NOISE!”
As a result of all the males showing off, we had tadpoles. Lots of ’em. (Females of this species may deposit 1,000-2,000 eggs in the water. We didn’t have THAT many ‘poles, but there were quite a few.) I checked on them daily, observing their dramatic change from sperm-like swimmers to proper miniature frogs. (That in-between stage, when newly sprouted legs dangle like mittens clipped to a kid’s sleeve, is my favorite.)
And then, once they all seemed more frog than fish (which takes around 50 days in this species), the whole show came to a close. Over a couple of nights, the tiny frogs, some still sporting half tails, fled their aquatic phase one by one.
For the parent frogs, it was mission accomplished.
And yet, even with their DNA scattered widely (the froglets have appeared in various other yards since emergence, according to neighborhood communications), the adult males are still at it, battling it out behind our house, keeping us on the edge of sleep until they finally shut up after midnight. (It’s usually about a four-hour chorus.) One of them barks like a seal, and I thought maybe it was another species joining the conversation. But I’ve decided it’s a gray tree frog’s special aggressive war cry. And that one mad warrior’s voice certainly stands out, especially when I have a migraine.
I suspect the pond will go quiet soon enough, when these uber competitors finally realize there’s no sex left to be had. The girls are done with you for now, you boneheads.
But dang, those froglets were adorable. I could hardly stand how cute they were! It was totally worth the late nights to witness their development and emergence. I do wonder, though, if next year even more males will find their way to our yard to take up a post around the pond, and whether the volume will finally reach unbearable.
I guess there’s always the broom.
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*It’s not a great photo of Daddy, but I took it blindly, hanging upside-down at the end of the rock shining a flashlight into the “cave” with one hand and trying not to drop my cell phone from the other. That second frog back there? Total surprise. A competitor, I’d guess. Perhaps they wrestled. Sorry I missed that.