State’s fragile frogs fighting to survive

LOS ANGELES — Katy Delaney stood at the top of the canyon, below her feet a wooded glen transformed into a wasteland.

At the bottom, the walls of the canyon were green with new scrub. Above that, the crooked black fingers of tree branches burned crisp by fire dangled like claws.

Delaney pointed to an open patch of sediment at the base of the canyon. A year ago, pools of cool water gleamed under the sun and frogs basked on their banks. Now, a trickle of water lazed through the mud. And the California redlegged frog, whose fate had consumed eight years of Delaney’s life, was nowhere to be seen.

The wildlife ecologist for the National Park Service and her colleagues had reintroduced the endangered frog to four sites in the Santa Monica Mountains. They kept the locations secret.

But they couldn’t hide the frogs from the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles County history.

Last year, the Woolsey fire turned the land charcoal-black and the trees into skeletons. At the fried bottom of the canyon, the pools of water filled with mud and sediment. Even if the frogs survived, they would have a hard time breeding in such a ravaged habitat.

It was one more hardship in the hard-luck story of California’s official amphibian, and a personal heartbreak for Delaney, who said protecting the frogs had become “my baby.”

“I put these frogs here,” she said. “You know, this is my work that I spent tons of time on . ... I’m very emotionally invested in them doing well.”

The California redlegged frog (Rana aurora draytonii) is the largest native frog in the western United States, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The frog gets its name from the rosy tinge frequently found on hind legs and abdomen.

Even in fiction, life has not been easy for the frog.

By most accounts, the star of Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was a red-legged frog. In the tale, the frog lost a jumping contest after being secretly force-fed a handful of buckshot.

Once found as far north as Shasta County and as far south as Baja California, the frog’s territory shrank year after year and its numbers diminished. They had the curse of tasting good. During the Gold Rush, miners “consumed nearly 80,000 of the frogs a year, nearly eating the species into extinction,” according to a finding by the California Legislature in 2014.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service blames the degradation and loss of the frog’s habitat on “agriculture, urbanization, mining, overgrazing, recreation, timber harvesting, nonnative plants, impoundments, water diversions, degraded water quality, use of pesticides and introduced predators.”

Then there was the American bullfrog, an invader from the East Coast that not only competed with smaller frogs, but ate them. The bullfrog also frequently carries a skin fungus that can be deadly to other amphibians.

Then in 1957, California passed a law declaring that “any person may possess any number of live frogs to use in frog-jumping contests.” its