Please excuse the double posting to nature recordists and the Nature
Sounds Society list.
I wasn't able to get out until after sundown. I drove across the
third street bridge, jammed with traffic because both northbound
lanes are occupied by construction equipment and crews working
overtime on the Third Street Light Rail project. I looped around and
parked where Illinois Street dead-ends into Islais Creek, across from
the warehouses long ago converted to artist habitats.
First I walked west along the shore in a tiny park strip that goes
along the creek to Third Street. There was nothing that looked like
frog habitat there; the tide was low and the rip-rap shore was
exposed.
When I was back at the end of Illinois St. I heard treefrogs! I
followed my ears up the fence line along Illinois to two big yellow
tubs with standing water, perfect mosquito habitat, and a drip
irrigation system for trees along the street and in a brushy thicket
on the other side of the fence. The frog sounds seemed to be coming
from an unnaturally concentrated point on the other side of the
fence. Listening, I discerned that the sound seemed to be gated or
noise reduction processed, with fragments of traffic noise and voices
mixed with the frogs. Sounded like a recording. But maybe what I was
hearing was some acoustic effect of a culvert opening. Maybe the
traffic and voices were coming through the culvert from somewhere
else. I wanted to make sure.
Back at the creek end of the street there's a place where one can
climb over a low fence and enter the little wild shorline strip the
residents call "Muwekma Ohlone Park." I squeezed through the thicket
back to the fence corner where the sound was coming from. Point
source. No culvert. I heard a click when the loop repeated.
Couldn't even fool me once, dudes.
-Dan Dugan
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