I spotted the coded message immediately. She’d published it in the “Ask an Expert” garden section, like we planned.
“Are frogs out earlier than usual in Oregon? I’ve noticed the frogs are out of hibernation early in Albany and Corvallis. I’ve lived in my homes for 13 years and never witnessed this.”
The expert responded this is their normal breeding time, and in McMinnville they’d started calling around Jan. 11.
That was the warning I waited for. Now I know the Pacific chorus frog was on the move, heading out from under leaves and plants and hopping towards their ancestral birth ponds, to breed and continue their life cycle for another year.
Albany and the other cities are an hour or two south of where I live. If the frogs are mobilizing there, they’ll be active in my own backyard very soon.
A few years ago I dug out two throw-rug sized ponds and a foot-wide creek between them in my backyard. The chorus frogs have bred there every early spring since then.
Each year, two thousand tadpoles hatched in those tiny ponds, two hundred tadpoles survived to become frogs, but just ten or twenty frogs returned seven months later to the ponds of their birth to breed.
I pace anxiously near the ponds, which I’ve named The Frog Mitigation Area. Where are the frogs?
You’ve been reading The Daily Bucket,
a nature refuge.
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Now its your turn--
What have you noted in your area or travels? Was that a scratchy old blues record, or a chorus frog ribbeting away? Please post your observations and general location in your comments. I’ll check back by lunchtime.
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