Do you remember when you used to open the door at dusk and hear the chirping, croaking, booming of amphibians? Do you remember being a child, and going outside right after a soaking rain, and there would be a plethora of earthworms rising to the surface, gasping for air in the soaked soil, and every couple of feet you stepped, the noise and vibration flushed out a frog or a toad.
I remember going to the creeks and ponds as a child in cut-offs, and an old tee-shirt. I probably had 3 years worth of dirt ground under my toenails. The bottoms of my feet were black as sackcloth, knee deep in the thick mud, and water, fishing for frogs, and crawdads, with a net, or a milk jug, or whatever else I could find that seemed like a probable tool.
I remember the calls of Woodhouse toads so loud at night from the tree line to the pasture next to us. Their calls sounded like the cries of unloved babies. Haunting, disturbing, even a little spooky. But not nearly so spooky as their absence today. They were often mixed in with the chuckling of leopard frogs, and clicking of cricket frogs in the wet marshy places.
I remember, as a child walking down the roads in town, and on the outskirts of town, and you couldn't walk 10 feet without seeing a dead toad or frog on the roadway. A quick poke in the bushes with a stick would flush out the living ones as well.
I remember my grandmother's greenhouse in Texas. She had anoles and tree frogs in with her orchids and her birds of paradise and her tropical hibiscus. I remember sitting in that space, very still, smelling the mold and loam that was innately present in such warmth and moisture. and the rot of wood chips used as mulch on the floor.
I recall going out at dusk, under the street lamps on the corner, and watching massive, fist-sized toads hunting in the dim light, while I collected lightning bugs from a veritable insect galaxy in the tall grass. The fauna even in suburbia had not quite been decimated. You could still see the tarantula and the larger wolf spiders, their eyes gleaming in the light from passing cars on the weedy roadside.
There was a time when a small child with frogs in their pocket, was promoted as a sort of cultural motif. Children with amphibians and reptiles seems as old as time.
Frogs and Snails and Puppy dog tails.
It saddens me to think that some day we might only see amphibians in zoos or in pictures. That all we might have left of them are their recordings, or renderings in art.
I just watched NATURE on OETA and this episode was on the Chytrid fungus [pronounced ki-trid] and how it has been globally devastating our Amphibian population. For me, who has been aware of this for a while. I guess there are other factors that play up on my fears.
When frogs cease calling in these parts, during normal seasons, you always wonder:
Did something eat the frogs?
Were they poisoned by something?
Did they succumb to the drought?
Or are they too being wiped out by this Chytrid Fungus?
When the frogs do make their appearance, there is always a sigh of relief. When I cannot find them or hear them, then tension builds. It feels much the same way when the Bumble Bees make their appearance in early summer. I feel like an ancient human who doesn't know that the sun will rise again tomorrow. So each appearance is cause for a celebration, and each hiccup in the schedule causes my heart to pound and my thoughts to turn ominously dark.
Now I can drive for miles and miles all over the place. And I see NO frogs or toads near the road, and no bodies on the road at any time, night or day.
I have walked the shore lines of lakes and ponds and creeks and seen very few and in some cases NO frogs.
I do find woodhouse toads in some urban areas though. And that was a relief. They appear to be adapting to human habitats like grackles and sparrows. But the bullfrogs? I have not heard them in 2 years. There used to be a colony behind my house. They used to make their music at the local ponds. We go out at night with spotlights to search for them and listen for them.
Nothing.
Already I cannot take my children out for the pleasure of seeing and catching Horned Toads. Something my father taught me as a child. These small spiked lizards, the color of sand and grit, which we all knew years before it was confirmed, could squirt blood from their eyes. They are endangered. They are MIA. I have to go to specially protected areas, just to catch a glimpse of them, if that. There are so few, that you don't bother them at all. You let the biologists show you a specimen.
Are frogs and toads going to be that way too?
In the absence of frogs, bats and hummingbirds [all are in decline] our mosquito population will explode and so will mosquito borne diseases.
I guess my kids are lucky. They have interacted directly with amphibians--will they be the last generation of children to do so? They have named the tree toads in the backyard. They pick them up once in a while and then put them back. Sometimes the tree toads hitch rides on people to other trees--avoiding the hazard of our chickens who would gladly eat them like a chocolate frog from Harry Potter.
When I think of all the folklore about frogs and how they sing for the rain to come, how they are psychopomps between this world and the next, always living between worlds of land and water--I wonder what other imperceptible losses their extinctions would bring us? As if their death weren't harsh enough on it's own, but that symbolically their loss will be so much more than that to us or to this world spiritually speaking. Frogs represent fertility and childbirth, and we are loosing them to endocrine disrupting chemicals that cause reproductive abnormalities in frogs and in humans. And now that our climate is changing and so many areas are being washed away or drying up--and the frog song is absent in some places, or fading fast.
Frogs are like the gate keepers to that watery place of becoming. The breech labor that will happen with their loss is terrible to contemplate.
Our ancestors perhaps instinctively understood what these animals represented in a whole ecosystem. But in our arrogance, we oversimplified these roles, til we forgot generation after generation the depth of the significance of these and other creatures.
You can view the whole Episode of Frogs-The Thin Green Line on PBS free.
Watching it makes me want to build a habitat in my backyard. If you can--you should.
When was the last time you heard the music of Amphibians? Can you name them by sight or sound yet? Would you miss them if they were gone?
I have a challenge for interested parties: Listen at dusk and at night and list the kinds of Amphibians you can hear. Try and catalog what is in your area, and see if you can identify if any amphibian species are missing.