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Re: Success! and some more samples

Subject: Re: Success! and some more samples
From: Walter Knapp <>
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 11:38:56 -0500
Marty Michener wrote:

> Walt:
> 
> Please add my heartfelt congratulations for your recent accomplishments as 
> well, and personal thanks for making your adventures so accessible to the 
> rest of us!  Reading provides a snow-bound naturalist a wonderful antidote 
> for the negative thermometrics.
> 
> As you know, Pseudacris brimleyi has a particular place in my sentiments 
> from my 1958 college trip to S.C.  If memory serves, I located two or three 
> under roadside boards by their vocalizations in mid-April, so I guess from 
> what you say that was very late for them.

They are definitely considered winter callers down here. Finding them 
still calling in mid-April would seem unusual. But, then, I've found 
Uplands Chorus Frogs (another winter caller) calling in July. I've 
learned not to call anything impossible.

The trip two weeks ago the  Brimley's were going great guns in S.C. And 
this trip the ones I found were very long pauses between calls, and very 
few calling. And the temp was 68 degrees and very humid/misty, every 
frog that was anywhere near breeding season was calling.

I would not say Brimley's is one I'm all that familiar with, I'm relying 
on the info from several herps folks as to when they call.

> Scaphiopus holbrooki is always a fortunate sometimes find.  Congratulations 
> again!  My first introduction was in DelMarVa in 1956, while a junior in HS 
> on a DVOC birding trip.  As you say, heavy rains had brought up a breeding 
> congress which only lasted a very few hours.  Then, eggs and silence.  I 
> thought they were common everywhere as a result of this fortuitous trip. 
> They have apparently been extirpated from all New England since the 1940's, 
> likely by DDT.  In 1975, the chairman of the Cons Comm of Lincoln, Mass, 
> Quincy Adams showed me ponds in Lincoln where he had found spadefoots 
> commonly after heavy summer rains as a boy (he was then 83), but none since 
> about 1950.

I think they are doing fine down here. We have all the AG sprays here 
too. I've found them in widely separate parts of the state. When I 
manage to find them they are plentiful. That was the case here, I heard 
a dozen or more choruses of them that night, in addition to the one I 
recorded.

What's more, the night after I got back I was outside and am almost 
certain I heard their calls from my house. Very distant, and before I 
could get a bearing traffic picked up on the nearby highway and I could 
not hear them again. They have been recorded from my county in the past, 
I've so far not found them here.

The other way to find them is drive along likely roads at night shining 
lights on the road banks. They have very distinctive pink eyeshine, easy 
to spot. I've had success at that a few times when they were not calling.

> In our book, "This Broken Archipelago", on the herps of Cape Cod (1976, 
> Quadrangle Press, out of print for > 15 years) Skip Lazell describes 
> finding a single Eastern Spadefoot in a flooded basement in 
> Nantucket.  Coincidentally, he and I do plan to post a version of this book 
> on my web pages, but much work must be done = 100 B/W photos to be 
> scanned.  I can email the text to anyone who asks - but in two weeks when I 
> get back - see NOTE below.

That will keep you busy for a while.

Walt





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