Hello
I was in Clanton Alabama this past weekend visiting a friend's farm.
A mile or so down the ridge from her house, there were some swampy
ponds that provided habitat for beaver and half a dozen or so species
of frogs. We hiked down there at sunset hoping to hear something (she
had never been down there after dark).
When we got down there, it seemed like every frog species in the area
had congregated in these pools. As some of you on the list well know,
Alabama (and Georgia) has been extraordinarily dry this season. Many
of the springs and ponds in the area were completely dry. It seems
that the only places in this area that were retaining water were the
valleys like this one.
We got to the site a little late, after the choruses started. A
generator or something had started somewhere in the distance that was
not running when we scouted the location earlier in the day. It also
seems that the county roads were closer than we had assumed.
Furthermore, I have to honestly say that I was not prepared for how
drastically the forest changes at night, and we left the site to
return to the house while the treeline was still visible. So all in
all, we were on site for about 30 minutes, which was not enough time
to wait for the sounds of man to quiet down.
In this recording, there are bird-voiced treefrogs, green treefrogs,
distant bullfrogs and green frogs, cricket frogs (I think), and
others that I cannot identify. If someone on the list would like to
take a crack at species identification, that would be great. I had
never heard a bird-voiced treefrog before, and I am now completely
obsessed with them. You will also hear the sound of a generator
coming from somewhere miles away and a passing car. The car seems to
stimulate the green treefrogs to call.
The whole episode has had me a little sleepless. All the things I
have read about the structure of choruses do not really match the
experience of listening to the bouts of one species sweeping over an
area and stimulating other species to sound in turn. Hearing this
multi-species chorus has got me wanting to move out of New York
*immediately* to find a nice little plot of land. Perhaps this can
happen by next spring.
I also cant stop thinking about how close man is to everything. Even
in a ridge valley full of coyotes, deer, beaver, and myriad frogs, we
are not far away and in many cases getting closer. With us come our
flatline sound generators. I suppose it just strikes me that its all
at this interesting balance, but one that we could tip voluntarily at
any time. It would not take but a single business deal to bring
bulldozers to those ponds in Clanton.
http://unnature.org/assets/2007/6/14/Clanton_AL.mp3
(4.2Mb 3mins)
Best
David
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