In late summer, 2014, I excavated a foot-deep card-table-sized pond fed by an artificial waterfall and a foot-wide creek. I designed it to provide a safe space for my yard’s native frogs to mate and breed.
I had frequently found tiny inch-long frogs hunkered under our garden’s plants, and I wanted to encourage the frogs to stay, and multiply, and eat slugs. I called the new pond and creek The Frog Mitigation Area.
These little critters are called tree frogs, peepers, chorus frogs, and Pseudacris regilla. I’ll call them chorus frogs.
A few tadpoles came with a pond plant purchase, and I put those in the pond but never saw them again. Fall, Winter, and Spring came and went, and I closely watched the pond. A couple of non-native bullfrogs showed up for a few days, but a raccoon probably feasted on them.
Then in June 2015, the scales fell from my eyes. I saw a little frog! And when I got down on my knees with my nose practically touching the pond, I saw about 100 pea-sized tadpoles, lazily floating in the sunny water, Several had legs. The frogs, and their tadpoles and eggs were so small and stealthy that I hadn’t seen them until June, although they likely had been breeding and leaving eggs there since early March.
Chorus frogs and their close relations can be found almost from the Arctic Circle to the Equator, and have adapted to the local conditions in all of these disparate climates. They generally spend most of their lives on land, within a quarter mile of where they were born. They only return to water in early Spring to breed in the pond of their birth.
Now the Frog Mitigation Area in my back yard is the birth pond for a cadre of Chorus Frogs. They’ve returned every late February or so for three years now, since I originally dug the ponds, and I’m expecting to hear from them again soon.
In the Pacific Northwest, chorus frogs seek out mates as early as January depending on local climates. Their predators such as bullfrogs and snakes are inactive in the cold, so the chorus frogs, their eggs and tadpoles have a brief respite from danger. The eggs hatch soon into tadpoles, which develop quickly, to avoid situations when their pond might dry out.
Everyone in my neighborhood knew when the frogs returned to the Mitigation Area on about March 7, 2016. Male chorus frogs croak loudly enough to be heard for half a mile, attracting females from considerable distances.
Tree frogs croak in different tones; a two-toned (diphasic) pitch to attract mates (or a “ribbet”), and a trill to warn off competitors from an already-occupied corner of the pond, and thus avoid fighting. Their croaking volume makes it difficult to estimate how many frogs are actually present; ten frogs sound like 100.
By April 9th, 2016, I guesstimated 1500 tadpoles have hatched.
By July, almost all had morphed into frogs and disappeared into the surrounding foliage.
On March 7, 2017, a couple of dozen of adult frogs returned, ribbeted up a storm, mated and left a few weeks later. A single female can produce several hundred eggs, and by May 4, about 2200 tadpoles hatched and appeared.
Two months later, they seemed to morph into frogs in two waves; one group at the beginning of July, and another group in August. The newly morphed frogs then disappeared into the strawberries, under the lavender bushes, around the compost pile, and other froggy destinations.
I’m now waiting for that generation of matured frogs from the hatch of ‘17 to arrive any day now and spin life’s cycle once again.
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