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By
Tamia Nelson
May 8, 2001
I've been thinking a lot about sex lately. Please don't jump to
conclusions, though. It's not my marriage. That's in fine shape, I'm happy
to say. No, it's just the voices that I hear in the night. I'm not going
crazy, mind. The "voices" I'm hearing are the spring chorus of frogs.
It began a little more than two weeks ago, when the peepers started up.
Peepers—scientists have cumbered them with the name Hyla
crucifer, on account of the dark St. Andrew's cross on their
backs—are tiny things, no more than an inch or so long. They've got
big bellows, though. If you paddle close by a marsh where they're getting
together for a sing-song, their massed voices can make your ears buzz and
ring.
The peepers don't stay alone on stage for long. While they're usually
the first frogs to be heard from every year, at least in northern North
America, they're soon joined by others. On many quiet evenings, I can
already hear a dry, woody rattle in the distance. This is the song of the
mink frog (Rana septentrionalis), a rather solitary northern
species with the curious habit of giving off a pungent, musky odor when
disturbed. In another month or so, when the bullfrogs first sound their
unmistakable jug-o-rum, rum rum, rum refrain, the amphibious choir
will be complete.
From the rumbling bass chorus of the bullfrogs to the chirpy tenor of
the peepers, frogs certainly sound exuberant enough, but they don't
necessarily love to sing. Actually, it's just the other way round. They're
singing for love. The peeps, rattles and booms now echoing over North
American waters are the froggy equivalent of Mae West's famous
invitation—"Why don't you come over sometime and see me?"—though
in the frogs' world it's the men who make the pitch and the ladies who
respond. (If they're of a mind, that is!)
The result is entirely predictable. When I go for an evening paddle
along the few places on the 'Flow where emergent vegetation hasn't been
replaced by timber seawalls, floating docks, or imported white-sand
swimming beaches, I occasionally shine the beam of my headlamp into the
shallows. The sight that greets my eyes would be enough to make even a
Roman emperor (or Hugh Hefner) blush. So frenetic and indiscriminate is
the frogs' knotting and gendering, in fact, that some species have
developed distinctive "release calls," protests reserved for occasions
when one male finds himself on the receiving end of another male's
unsought-after and unwanted attentions. I suppose it's the froggy
equivalent of "Get lost, Buddy!"
In any case, there's no escaping the fact that frogs are gluttons in
all things. Three summers back, an enormous bullfrog set up
housekeeping in a small pool on our slope. His length exceeded the maximum
span of my hand, and he had the unshakeable confidence that comes with the
certain knowledge that he was lord of all he surveyed. He came and went as
he wished. He'd leave in the evening to go courting, then return during
the day to feed on whatever came to "his" pool to drink. And he wasn't a
fussy eater. Garter snakes, mice, and small birds all found their way onto
his menu from time to time. Farwell soon started calling him "Big Bill,"
in recognition of the Presidential scale of his appetites—and in
rueful acknowledgement of his peculiar, even perverse, charm. Sadly, Big
Bill didn't return for a visit during the following year, and we haven't
seen him since. Nature's less forgiving than the US Congress, apparently.
Like our former, larger-than-life President, however, frogs and toads
are survivors. They're direct descendents of the evolutionary line that
first established a more-or-less permanent beachhead on dry land, some 350
million years ago next Tuesday. Modern frogs—and their cousins, the
long-tailed newts and salamanders—came later. They made their
appearance only 200 million years ago, at a point on the earth's calendar
that geologists have christened the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. For folks
like me who enjoy the frogs' spring chorus, this was a red-letter day.
But nothing lasts forever. Even survivors succumb sooner or later, and
there are signs that frogs and toads may have had their innings. Nowadays
on the 'Flow, the real voice of spring is the chain-saw, followed almost
immediately by the backhoe and the bulldozer. Summer homes pop up like
early-season wildflowers, and every new home entombs a pocket marsh or
tiny pool. Naturally enough, the summer homes bring summer people, and,
naturally enough, they bring their motorboats and jet-skis. But
with the resulting increase in boat traffic also comes accelerated
shoreline erosion. Seeing their valuable waterfront property washing away,
the summer people then do what they're told to do by the
"experts"—they put up a seawall. The result? It's not a happy one.
The summer people save their beachfront, to be sure, but this protection
comes at a price: their last vestige of biologically productive shoreline
is destroyed in the process.
Little by little, this takes its toll. Unlike the summer people, many
of whom flock to the North Country for four months every year, only to
head back to homes or jobs in North Carolina or Florida when winter first
begins to bite, the frogs and toads who are displaced from their
homes have nowhere else to go. So, like other rootless refugees elsewhere
on this increasingly crowded globe, they die, and their voices die with
them.
Nor is this all. Nowadays, even the spring rains bring death. When I
dip acid-sensitive litmus paper in a drop of rainwater, more often than
not the paper turns a deep, corrosive red. It isn't called "acid rain" for
nothing, I'm afraid, and every day there's more of it on the wind. Already
many of the lakes on the western slope of the Adirondacks are silent and
sterile, their eerie, picture-postcard beauty undisturbed by the fertile
clamor of chorusing frogs. Soon, perhaps, the 'Flow will follow them.
But not yet. And who knows? Frogs have been raising lusty hell for 200
million years. We humans have been around for far less time. In the
high-stakes gamble of evolution, nature runs an honest house, and it's
never wise to bet against a favorite. After all, when a wandering asteroid
put paid to the dinosaurs only 65 million years ago, frogs and their kin
hardly noticed the disturbance. Come to think of it, in all the long
history of life on earth, small and sexy has trumped big and brawny more
often than not. So maybe it's too early to write amphibians off as a dead
end. Maybe the world's ponds and marshes will echo to the spring
chorus—the same spring chorus that I look forward to so much—for
yet another 200 million years, or more. I'd like to think so, at any rate.
I won't be there to hear it, of course, but someone will.
Copyright © 2001 by Verloren Hoop Productions. All rights
reserved.
Sex in the Water
200 Million Years Old and Still Going Strong
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