A few weeks ago, I heard, but could not locate, Litoria peronii. This
was the only time I've heard one at Laratinga Wetland near Mt Barker,
South Australia. (35=B0 4.169'S 138=B0 52.876'E)
I'd been recording frog vocalisations at the eastern end of Laratinga
and could hear VERY faintly, what I thought at the time, a Kookuburra
trying to get its song started. (If you know what I mean). Realising
it wasn't a bird, I slowly, over the period of about 30 minutes, (and
500 metres) narrowed down the rough location. At the time, it was only
calling about once every five minutes, so the locating was very slow.
Anyhoooo, over the next few nights I narrowed it down to one
particular tree on the edge of the pond, but again, it was too high to
be seen. Then suddenly, the next night, it was gone. At that stage I
still had not actually seen the frog, and since it went missing about
4 weeks ago, I've not heard it since.
Last evening while walking around Laratinga, I heard it again. I went
back to the location I knew it to be in, but it wasn't there. It had
moved about 150 metres north and was now living in some reeds at the
edge of the wooden boardwalk. So I spent some time recording it's call
(again, only once every few minutes) and after managing to poke my
eyes a few times on the reeds, thought I'd try something.
My recorder, a Sound Devices 702, has no speaker for playback, so
turning up the headphone volume I placed the headphones on the edge of
the boardwalk and kept replaying one of it's calls. Every time it
played, the frog replied, and within a minute, it actually made it's
way from deep within the reeds to climb out onto the wooden railing.
While this was great to see in itself, it actually had another frog
(about 2/3 it's own size) sitting on it's back. A lovely pair of
Litoria peronii sitting on the rail answering my playback.
Unfortunately, when I have my recording gear, I don't take my camera,
so I only got a poor mobile phone picture in the light of a torch.
I was able to let it crawl back into the reeds and call it out again
with the playback several times, so it's an interesting exersize in
behaviour.
Attached is a short segment of recording. The shotgun microphone was
hanging over the wooden rail, buried into the reeds about half a metre
above the water level. The first quiet calls are Spotted Grass Frog
(Limnodynastes tasmaniensis)
AND it's still the ONLY one I've heard here.
Regards
John
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