Chiming in a bit late here, but most of what you've heard seems correct to
me. Here at 56N 120W, wood frogs are the most common amphibian. They
normally start to get active around mid-April and will have largely called
it quits by early May. The whole cycle is affected by early or late spring
(pushing things up or back by as much as 2 weeks). Any one pond seems to be
really active for about a week, and you can extend your recording
opportunities by chasing down the colder sites that lag behind the peak (e.g
higher elevation ponds). The chorus can be overwhelming at times...id
examples may be best obtained from single frogs later in the season. For
'sensitivity', they are more wary during the day, and either see or feel (or
both) human intruders and clam up for quite some time. There shouldn't be
any trouble with scaring (or recording) them from 10m away, however. They
are even more approachable at night. Once they're on to you, you may as well
leave & come back half hour later. During the peak time, they seem to call
from dusk until long into the night. There are a few ponds within a couple
hundred metres of my house, and for a few weeks I am treated to a raucous,
quacking serenade. Only a month and a bit away, but for now it's still the
land of ice & snow.
Mark Phinney
on 3/3/03 6:25 PM, bbystrek <> at wrote:
Does anyone have any advice recording wood frogs? Last spring was my
first experience hearing these frogs - They have the most unusual
voices of the ten frogs and toads that call Connecticut home. They
are supposed to be one of the earliest breeders here in Connecticut
as they are said to use temporary pools which dry up by early
summer. I just started learning nature recording last spring, just a
little too late to catch them.
Is it right that they typically only breed for a few days a year?
Some of the texts I found so far seem to conflict on this point.
I heard a wonderful chorus on the first evening I discovered them.
Two failed attempts recording them on return visits a couple days or
so later seemed to suggest that were very sensitive to ground
vibration or had better eyesight than me as they stopped calling for
longer than my patience and nerves could hold up (same evening a
beaver scared the wits out of me as it began briskly chewing on a
tree probably thirty feet away). Another theory was that on my
second and third visits the temperature was rapidly dropping and they
simply did not start back up because it had grown too cold.
Could wood frogs possibly have a really long cycle to their chorus?
Don't some frogs have periods of peak activity where the chorus rises
and falls on something like a 30 minute period? I noticed some
obvious response to jet rumble with another species, Hyla versicolor
(gray tree frog), where they stop calling for a few minutes as the
jet noise peaks. I'm pretty sure I was seeing the same thing with
Bull Frogs. Of course disruptions, people or otherwise, don't seem
to matter as much when the chrous is really active.
Anyway, any advice would be appreciated.
Brian Bystrek
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