FrogWatch
I'm in the army now.
A group of frogs is called an army. 1
It may take another army, or at least a whole brigade of human conservationists, to help them because there is trouble over the croaking branch of the amphibian world. Some 41 percent of frog species are threatened by extinction. The largest two threats are habitat loss related to human expansion, and a water-borne fungus that is killing frogs, already wiping out 200 species around the world.2
This week, I give you FrogWatch USA.
I began learning about community science after volunteering to help monitor water quality at Atlanta’s Procter Creek in late 2022. My subsequent research on the subject led me to a constellation of projects, including things like Globe at Night, which documents light pollution, and FrogWatch, which monitors frog populations. To find community science projects that interest you, try using these keywords: citizen science, community science, participatory science, or by just viewing the event or volunteer section of the websites of conservation groups.
FrogWatch is all about the hearing and the listening. Hearkening would be another way to put it, but the term is not exactly right because in Biblical terms hearkening means “to listen with the intent to obey.” I like frogs, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
The season for frog watching begins in February, so Fred and I attended two hours of FrogWatch training at the Sandy Creek Nature Center in Athens recently. Naturalists Kate Mowbray and Michelle Cash did a great job for the 25 community scientists gathered in a bright classroom that afternoon. We learned about the background of FrogWatch, and everyone’s favorite part was watching videos of local frog species and hearing their calls.
Here are the frog-sounding word pieces I invented and wrote in my notes to help me remember the calls our teachers were trying to drill into us:
Preep. Cricky. Crick. (Upland Chorus Frog.)
Urg. Urg. Urg. Bonk. Moonk. (Barking Tree Frog.)
Unaaaaa. Unaaaa. Unaa. (Pickerel Frog.)
Preep-preep-Preep-preep. (Spring Peeper).
Fred liked learning the actual names of the frogs, like the Southern Leopard Frog, Eastern Spadefoot and the Bird-voiced Treefrog. I loved the playlist idea suggested by Mowbray.
“Here’s what you do,” she told us. “Until you really learn all these frog calls by heart, create yourself a Spotify playlist of them. Sit in the car and listen for a few minutes before going out. It will refresh your memory.”
Out of the 25 FrogWatch trainees in class that day, most of them appeared to be in their twenties. That, we thought, was encouraging for the future of frogs.
If you decide to be a part of the human army participating in FrogWatch (some 15,000 people from all the states), you’ll need to do in-person or online training at the website, and observe (listen for) frogs 30 minutes after sunset or later. FrogWatch has specific protocol for community scientists to follow to ensure they get a dataset they can analyze and use for comparisons year after year, and the timing is an key data point.
You can NOT just go and record a bunch of random frog yells while out on a random daytime bike ride and expect to come home and upload the information to the FrogWatch website. No, this much I’ve learned because I tried to do it before I fully understood the rules. No daytime data is accepted in the data fields. Also, I’ve learned I cannot identify frogs calls yet. I texted my recording to my new community science friend, Shaundon Moore, who told me what I was hearing. Moore, introduced here in the Feb. 2 issue, texted: “Upland Chorus Frogs. They sound like you had a pen and a comb and if you slowly rubbed the pen across the teeth of the comb.”
Anyhow, The Everyday Scientist newsletter gladly accepts my recordings, so sit back and enjoy the daytime cacophony of some Paulding County, Ga. frogs:
The February Song of the Upland Chorus Frogs
I will continue FrogWatch activities into the summer. Globally, work is going on to protect amphibian species, and I want to write about international conservation efforts. I recently learned from two AmphibiCast podcasts that have a global scope. One podcast featured amphibian expert, Dr. Brian Gratwicke, originally from Zimbabwe, who talks about frog disease. The other podcast is an interview with an ecotourism guide from Peru who tells how all the tourists go crazy with joy when he leads them into the wetlands and they first lay eyes on a Poison Dart Frog. The links:
Podcast: Amphibian Disease Mitigation Strategies
Podcast: Poison Frogs of the Cordillera Sira
Coming up: Audubon’s Great Backyard Bird Count. I’ll be watching for the chickadees, cardinals, finches and more in Tennessee at my little sister’s backyard bird feeders.
If you have started, or are considering starting, any community science projects of your own, please leave a comment to tell me about it.