Backyard Biodiversity April 15, 2020

This month's Backyard Biodiversity post is a little late. Given that many of us are trying to stay at home with the current Covid-19 pandemic afoot, I have been getting more time to take walks to the nearby park. This is a great time of year to check out your local wetlands, because the frogs and toads are out en masse! Calling like crazy, hoping to find a mate and make some baby frog and toadlets!

I do not plan to post any pictures, and I was hoping I could post video ...but weebly wants more money for that. So I am posting youtube links to video's I took of calling frogs and toads for you to listen to, and see if you too can learn to identify these species by their calls. 

So this first one, you have to try and hear over the din of my footsteps, a siren and the cacopchany of silly birds, but if you listen carefully you can hear the low frequency chuckling of the Souther Leopard Frog (Lithobates sphenocephalus). Leopard frogs  have the most amusing calls in my opinion. They sound like they are laughing at you. As the video progresses you start to hear more of the chorus frogs (Boreal or Western Chorus Frogs -Pseudacris maculata - in this video). It sounds like a finger running against the teeth of a comb. Chorus frogs are some of the earliest calling and breeding frogs in North America.

Next we have the seemingly ubiquitous American toad (Anaxyrus americanus). Who am I kidding they are also one of my favorite calls, I love the trill of a toad. In this video it may be hard to distinguish the trill becase there are so many calling. Near the very end, you will here the high pitched peeps of none other than the Spring Peeper (Pseudacris crucifer). These tiny little frogs pack a punch when it comes to their calls, although you cannot tell from this video, when you have a full on chorus of spring peepers it is deafening. In grad school sometimes we would have to grab pairs of peepers for acoustic tests. I hated having to go out for peepers. Cute though they may look and sound, getting that close to them while they call makes your ears throb.

Here is a video with fewer toads calling, so you can really hear how pretty their trill is, there is also a leopard frog laughing.

Gray Treefrog

I am such a liar, OK, I am posting a pic of a frog. This little guy was found in early April in my back yard. This is a gray treefrog. Here in Missouri they have just started calling, but they are still way up in the trees and the males are just warming up their vocal chords. They have a warbley trill call. We have two species here in Missouri, Hyla versicolor and Hyla chyrsoscelis. They cannot be told apart by appearance or morphology. Instead you can tell them apart by their calls. Why is that and what do they sound like? Well that will be for a later time. Full gray trefrog  chorusing at breeding ponds will not start up for them until May or so, with summer being their peak calling period. By then we should also be hearing my other favorite call (what does that make it now 3 favorite calls??), that of the Cricket frog (Acris crepitans). Cricket frog calls sound like the banging together of two marbles or stones together. It is one of my favorites, because it was the first call that I was able to learn and easily recognize which species it belonged to.