When my ears long for sounds of sanity in a summer of confusion, the plucky voice of the green frog cuts through the chaos.
He’s not loud, but his voice carries. He listens more than he speaks, but when he does talk, I want to hear what he has to say.
In short, he’s my kind of guy, and at night when he provides backup vocals to the tree frogs, I fall sleep wondering what his life is like. In the morning when I’m making my coffee, I look forward to seeing him on my daily rounds. Though he doesn’t always show his dazzling face, he makes himself known through the woodland, greeting the catbirds and marking the rise and fall of cicada song.
Many voices compete for my attention during this summer of reckoning, and some days they split my mind into more lines of thought than I can follow to their natural ends, flash-flooding a parched head-scape that can’t possibly absorb it all. It’s in those moments that I seek the company and clarity of the voice of someone untethered to human culture, someone unaware of the latest farces and failures of compassion and common sense, who seems to have a natural affinity for knowing when to speak up and when to let silence in.
With his self-assured clucks and the descending notes that follow—the aural equivalent of ellipses that leave me hanging on his every word—the green frog’s voice emanates through rains and birdsong. It rises above lawnmowers, chainsaws, and other macho yelling machines that have taken over the neighborhood. Sometimes the frog might be calling for a mate, or sometimes he might be protecting his territory. But after months of sitting near him in companionable silence, I wonder if he’s also just letting the world know he exists: “Hello, I’m here, and this is my song.”
Whatever Floats Their Boats?
Before this year, I didn’t know much about green frogs, except that they liked to hang out on the floating rescue ramps in the swimming pool and hide in the spiral-shaped skimmer insert that resembles an apartment fire escape. While other amphibians and insects use these contraptions for their intended purpose—to keep from drowning—green frogs treat them more like snack bars where they can dawdle and wait for easy prey.
When my husband, Will, and I dug a pond this spring in the hopes of luring them to a safer and more natural setting, the plan worked, for the most part. Though one frog still visits his old haunts, several others have settled into pond life, spending their days under rocks and bark or floating on fallen leaves as if they’re hanging out on a pool raft, margarita in hand.
It’s Always a Party at the Pond
Watching the frogs from a bench about eight feet away, I’m distant enough to keep from scaring them but close enough to get a peek into their daily routines. A couple of the frogs are wary of my presence and dip under water when I round the bend in the path, but one seems to have the opposite reaction, sometimes swimming over to me as I plant seedlings near the pond’s edge. Once he even hopped up on a nearby rock and kept me company as I worked.
Joining us in this little oasis are hunting dragonflies, a cheeky chipmunk, and wasps and butterflies gathering water directly from the pond. Evenings are full of surprises: A few weeks ago, a scarlet tanager flew toward the walnut tree behind the bench where Will and I sat, coming within inches of our faces before making a quick right turn into the sassafras trees. One night a teenage rabbit hopped down the path, checked out the plants, and came over to the bench to sit right underneath me before navigating around my flip-flops and nibbling on grass a few feet away.
A Unexpected Tadpole Feast
Water striders and tadpoles swim with the frogs now, and one week I watched the tadpoles methodically feeding around a frog’s mouth and down his backside. I thought of the fish who scour parasites from hippos’ skin and even clean their teeth; this mutual exchange provides nutrients for the fish and a day at the spa for the hippos, who seem to relax into the activity with delight. I wondered if a similar relationship was at work here, though judging by the frog’s eventual reaction—a shakeoff that looked born of irritation—maybe being nipped at by tadpoles wasn’t as pleasurable. “I’m guessing that the tadpoles seen grazing on the skin of this male green frog may be grazing on the outer mucous layer of his skin,” explained herpetologist Jack Cover when I sent him the video to learn more. Though tadpoles eat a lot of algae and even have specialized dental plates to scrape it from surfaces, “they are not strictly herbivorous,” he wrote. “They will opportunistically feed on dead tadpoles, fish, insects and other animal protein.”
Frog Frenemies?
Green frogs are fairly solitary, yet I’ve seen more than one sharing the pond day after day. Sometimes they appear to tussle for territory, but often they just sit on opposite sides, giving each other a wide berth. So it was with fascination that I recently watched a frog slip under the water and come up for air right next to another, resting her head on his back for a few minutes until the frog underneath broke the spell with a shudder that seemed to say: “Back up off me!”
Were they friends who annoyed each other? Mates? Potential mates? Through my camera and with my poor eyesight, I couldn’t even be sure of her species, let alone her gender. An enlarged view on my computer screen and another conversation with Jack revealed that this was likely not a friendly encounter, because the frog who’d been making the moves was a young female bullfrog. She could have been attempting a land grab (or a pond grab?), Jack explained, or she may have even had even more nefarious goals in mind: Bullfrogs eat other frogs, even of their own kind. “She may have been checking out a potential prey item,” Jack told me, “and deemed the green frog too large to eat once she got up close.”
It’s more than just a frog-eat-frog world out there, though. Bullfrogs also eat aquatic eggs, insects, snakes, worms, fish, salamanders, crustaceans and many other animals. Green frog diets include terrestrial beetles and other insects, spiders, small fish, crayfish, small snakes, snails, and yes, other frogs—or, as many sources write, anything that will fit into their mouths. There are no food shortages for them here in our habitat, and I hope to keep restoring more wetland areas in the coming years. It’s the least I can do for the animals who’ve given so much comfort to me, the few voices of sanity rising above the chaos of humans who have lost their senses—and, too often, their capacity for being sensitive to the needs of their closest neighbors, both wild and otherwise.
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