John,
Ah yes the machine-gun frog - that rattle can be deafening when you
are close to one! Interesting that it responded to your headphone
playback. Your Spotted Marsh Frog in South Australia seems to have a
more rapid rat-a-tat call that I hear around my place in Central
Tablelands of NSW.
Some Green Treefrogs around my house sometimes respond
enthusiastically when I turn the washing machine on, it has a loud
pulsing sound reminiscent of the frog's own call. Not exactly
playback, but the same result.
Vicki Powys
Australia
On 26/11/2008, at 12:25 PM, John Tudor wrote:
> 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)
>
> http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/
> kJ8sSTsuori3xo3NdtKHU432m7XQyS4bXpgnK2Ju-lhUIfyYDTZp6rJNuR6GawjGN-
> pIWosGiOHjZUb8S_QTS9JSWQm5oJNT/John%20Tudor%27s%20Files/
> Litoria_peronii.mp3
>
> AND it's still the ONLY one I've heard here.
>
> Regards
> John
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> "While a picture is worth a thousand words, a
> sound is worth a thousand pictures." R. Murray Schafer via Bernie
> Krause
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
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