A new season arrives with the sounds that herald spring
There’s been not a peep, nor quack or croak.
But very soon, wood frogs, defrosted from their winter shutdowns, will head to vernal pools and start a quacking quarreling-duck racket. Then peepers will emerge, singing loudly in full chorus.
For humans who follow amphibians, it’s one of the first sounds of spring.
“I have not heard them yet,” said Ann Taylor, executive director of Redding’s New Pond Farm nature center. “But I’ve been purposefully leaving my window open to listen for them.”
“I would suggest there are wood frogs already out,” said Billy Michael od Bethel, who annually tracks emerging frogs and salamanders.
Michael said he has yet to check out the vernal pools in Huntington State Park, which overlaps the Bethel-Newtown border.
“They could be in a pool up there,” he said. “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
Throughout the state and the country, people are doing the same thing, joining the citizen science project Frog Watch USA – the amphibian equivalent of the Christmas Bird Count.
Run by the national Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Frog Watch gives volunteers basic training on frog and toad identifications, based on the sounds they make. The volunteers then go to a local pond, marsh, or vernal pool, listen throughout the spring and summer, and send in their findings.
Three organizations in western Connecticut — the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport and the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk — are sponsoring Frog Watch.
The Maritime Aquarium will hold its final Frog Watch virtual training session from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on March 25. For more information go www.maritimeaquarium.org/citizen-science
Bridget Cervero, manager of the aquariums citizen science programs, said there are about 100 volunteers in the program so far.
“About 25 are returning volunteers, which is really great,” she said.
The Norwalk River Watershed Association and the Woodcock Nature Center in Ridgefield and Wilton are collaborating on vernal pool activities this year, including virtual workshops, creating Frog and Toad Abode kits and a sold-out vernal pool walk on March 20 – World Frog Day.
“We want people to see vernal pools,” said Sarah Breznan, Woodcock’s director of education
Along with the pleasure of tramping around the edges of moist terrain listening for high-pitched peepers in spring or the bullfrogs’ mid-summer basso croak, the project serves to monitor the American amphibians’ increasing peril.
The U.S. Geological Survey has reported that amphibian species are declining in every region of America at a rate of almost 4 percent a year. Some species may disappear in the U.S. by 2040, the survey says.
Connecticut has 11 species of frog and toads. One, the eastern spadefoot toad is a state endangered species while another, the northern leopard frog, is a species of special concern.
Michael Ravesi, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said frogs are important to the state’s ecosystem as both predators are prey.
Frogs eat insects, Ravesi said. In turn they’re eaten by owls, foxes, raccoons and coyotes.
“Just about anything that can get its mouth around a frog will eat them,” Ravesi said.
In vernal pools, frog eggs feed insects, opossums, skunks and turtles. When the eggs hatch into tadpoles, the tadpoles eat vegetation and bacteria, Breznan said. In turn, a variety of predators dig into tadpoles at the vernal pool smorgasbord.
“Bigger frogs eat smaller frogs,” she said.
Frogs are also important as indicator species. They have permeable skin and can absorb anything flowing into an ecosystem’s water supply. If frogs are in trouble, something’s wrong.
“It can be weed killer or detergent, anything,” said Breznan, of Woodcock Nature Center
The DEEP’s Ravesi said there’s now evidence that the drugs humans take work their way into water systems — either because people flush pills down the toilet, or excrete medication in their wastes. That may be harming frogs as well.
“Just releasing it from our own bodies has implications for frogs,” he said.
Another factor is human destruction of amphibian habitat. Climate change may add to amphibians’ decline.
Wood frogs and peepers are forest dwelling frogs who only head to vernal pools — small pools filled by spring rain and melting snow — to mate.
If the climate warms too quickly in the spring, Ravesi said, those pools may dry up too quickly, interfering with the progression of egg-to-tadpole-to-frogs.
So listen, while you still have the chance.
“Wood frogs and peepers,” Ravesi said. “They kind of herald spring.”