The 2.5-cm frog that stopped bulldozers
The western chorus frog, in whose name the federal Environment Minister has made an emergency order stopping construction of 171 units of a large Quebec residential development, is a wee speck of a thing, no bigger than a coin.
These are not the frogs little kids chase, or whose legs poach nicely in herbed butter. In French they are called rainettes faux- grillon, literally little false cricket frogs, because they do not croak so much as chirp, in chorus, hence the English name. The only time people notice them is during this springtime singalong. The rest of the year they are mostly underground, trying to stay moist.
Pseudacris triseriata, as it is known to science, is hardly a poster creature for conservation, but on Wednesday it joined the sage grouse as the only animal ever protected by emergency fiat of the federal cabinet, and the first to be protected on private land.
Catherine McKenna, minister of environment and climate change, decided the frog population on Montreal’s South Shore faces an “imminent threat” from Symbiocité, a large development set in a conservation area. As a result, more than 1,000 units will still be built, but 171 will not, and two square kilometres will be protected from any kind of disturbance.
It is a rare legal move, but a common story for the frogs. The places they live in “look like places that would be just perfect to build subdivisions, because they’re flat and they’re damp and the water that’s in them where the frogs breed dries up by the end of August and it doesn’t look like anything,” said David M. Green, president of The Herpetologists’ League and director of McGill University’s Redpath Museum.
“Over most of its range it’s not doing particularly well, simply because it lives in places that nobody associates with frogs, that are flat and easy to build on.”
Green lives near the development site and saw an earlier plan that included a frog pond, which would have been catastrophic for the Western Chorus Frog, as it would be the perfect home for the larger frogs that eat them.
He said he feels sorry for the contractors because the site is a great place to build and they have been allowed so far to do so, but now they are “stuck,” their plans labelled a threat to a vulnerable species.
A conservation group tried to fight the plans in court, but failed, and the former environment minister, Peter Kent, declined to issue this emergency order. In December, though, a Federal Court judge ordered the new minister, McKenna, to reconsider.
That decision inspired crass jokes about frogs having disproportionate influence in Ottawa, and it led to this latest unusual reversal. In it, the judge quoted the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Antonio Lamer’s description of a “rule of civilization.”
“Within t he hierarchy of our planet animals occupy a place which, if it does not give rights to animals, at least prompts us, as animals who claim to be rational beings, to impose on ourselves behaviour which will reflect in our relations with animals those virtues we seek to promote in our relations among humans.”
Strip away the verbose prose and you are left with the conclusion McKenna came to — t hat humans should simply not be beastly to animals, even little itty bitty frogs.