Last night the spring temperatures moderated here in Illinois. The air was calm and the collective voice of chorus frogs singing in the wetland behind our house could be heard inside even with the windows closed. So we grabbed our flashlights and waded into the wetland to see if we could find a frog and get a photo.
It shouldn’t be hard, but it is. In case you’re not familiar with the call of chorus frogs, when singing together they sound like a single high pitched note. Heard closer, each frog makes a noise like the sound of a finger clicking across the tines of a plastic comb. It has a creaking quality, and even a single frog is quite loud to the ears. It is equivalent to turning the sound up about halfway on your car stereo. These little frogs are loud.
But they’re not large. Chorus frogs are not much bigger than the length of your thumbnail. Yet their ability to fill their throat sacks with air and pump out noise is quite well developed. Amphibians have a long and colorful history in the evolution of the world. This wonderful description from ThoughtCo.com gives just a snippet of why amphibians are so significant to understanding our own position in this scenario:
Here’s the strange thing about amphibian evolution: You wouldn’t know it from the small (and rapidly dwindling) population of frogs, toads and salamanders alive today, but for tens of millions of years spanning the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods amphibians were the dominant land animals on earth. Some of these ancient creatures achieved crocodile-like sizes (up to 15 feet long, which may not seem so big today but was positively huge 300 million years ago) and terrorized smaller animals as the “apex predators” of their swampy ecosystems.
Pecking orders
Now, chorus frogs aren’t about to chomp on your foot and suck you down into the watery abyss. But there is a pecking order in this world among all animals. And even chorus frogs have to eat. A site called BioKids.com shares: “Chorus frogs eat a variety of small invertebrates, including ants, flies, beetles, moths, caterpillars, leafhoppers, and spiders. Newly formed froglets feed on smaller prey, including mites, midges, and springtails. Tadpoles are herbivorous, foraging mostly on algae in the water.”
While singing, the last thing on any chorus frog’s mind is eating. They are basically a pack of horny males trying to get a chance to mate. The louder the call, one must suppose, the more inviting to the female. Such is the order of nature down to some of its smallest occupants.
Humans afoot
So we walked out into the wetland behind our house with our flashlights hoping to find one boldly calling male whose ardor put him in view. Alas, we had no luck. Chorus frogs excel in camouflage (see their cryptic coloring?) despite their loud calls. You can be standing right above them listening to their calls and still it is hard as heck to see them.
I’ve actually had more luck during daylight than at night. A few years back during a Naturalist Certificate class, we paid an April visit to a preserve where chorus frogs were singing in the middle of the morning. They often sing all day and most of the night. And for some reason one of these little guys was perched right on top of a knob of wood singing his little guts out. The tiny throat sack below his froggy chin pulsed with each call. It was fascinating to see and hear.
Earning froggy credits
Way back in college, I enrolled in a field biology class where part of our spring project was to capture no less than six species of frogs. We’d release them after chronicling their ID in the classroom. But there was a very short window of time in which it was possible to even find all six frog species. There were spring peepers and cricket frogs. Leopard and green frogs. Bullfrogs and chorus frogs. And if one was really, really lucky, one might find a wood frog calling. But that was extra credit.
At one point, my frog hunt involved wading out into a cold spring where the water was just above forty degrees. I was skinny as a rail back then and possessed of my own set of scrawny frog legs from all the running we were doing in spring track and field. We didn’t have wading boots so the task of entering the water was chilling to say the least. But I was struggling in field biology because the lab work was vexing to my art major brain. So I needed every ounce of credit I could gain. So the frog hunt was on.
Standing out in that cold spring was enlightening. After a bit, the cold wore off and it was just the dank pressure of water on my thighs. Feeling my way across the bottom with my feet, I proceeded slowly toward the sound of some frogs singing in the center of the pond. It wasn’t deep, but it was dark water and smelled vaguely of the history of the entire earth.
We are all formed from water. Descended from amphibians. Borne of the ages. And that afternoon after the frog hunt in the cold spring, I felt cold-blooded during the mile run in which I competed. I couldn’t warm up well no matter how much I tried. Lesson learned: warm-blooded creatures need fat to keep themselves warm. I had none at the time to apply to that purpose.
It took a while in that cold spring to catch a chorus frog. But eventually, I snagged a pale specimen and plopped him into the jar with the holes poked in the lid. I also captured a spring peeper that day. But getting one frog into the jar without allowing the other to hop out was quite a trick while standing hip-deep in water so cold I did not know if my testicles would ever return to normal size again.
Frog assembly
Back at the dorm I already had a small aquarium filled with the other frogs required for the assignment. I assembled partitions to keep them apart. But somehow the leopard frog that I captured earlier that day wriggled its way around its wooden partition and snapped up my chorus frog in its mouth. I quickly jammed a hand in there and picked them both up. The pale legs of the chorus frog were still protruding from the mouth of the leopard frog. So I gave the sides of his mouth a squeeze because I knew the bone structure from having dissected a few leopard frogs over the years. That made the frog release my other specimen and I made better preparations to keep them apart.
Forty years on
So it was with a bit of nostalgia that I crept around the wetland last night in hopes of seeing one of these little buggers singing. I’m grateful to live so close to a wetland like this. I could turn and look at our house where the lights were on and I knew it was warm inside.
Eventually, my toes really started to feel numb. My daughter and her beau were also out looking, and one hopping frog was spotted. But no photos were captured. So we headed back inside and I took off my old running shoes and my soaked jeans in the garage, then threw the lot into the laundry.
Round two
I have not given up this year’s frog quest. There is still the opportunity to head out there in the daytime. The frogs are singing and won’t stop for at least a week or two, maybe more.
After all, there is breeding to be done and millions of years of evolution to continue, and that’s a challenge these days. The world is not the vast domain of amphibians anymore. The odds against them have increased in many ways. Between water pollution and holes in the ozone, busy roads and drained wetlands, amphibians are struggling to keep their toehold in this world.
Fate alone can be harsh. Last year our little wetland released a large hatch of green frogs that emigrated in all directions. Their smashed bodies were seen all over the road and frog legs were everywhere. An enterprising flock of gulls could have eaten like kings.
But mostly, such events amount to squander. That is the way of nature. It works hard to evolve something unique and useful such as frog legs and more often than not, tosses all that effort away to extinction. 99% of all the living things that ever existed are now extinct.
Some might argue that’s a good excuse to ignore the effects of human activity in this world. The extinction rate among plants and animals in this world is rising as the human population increases. The competition for food and space and resources is all-consuming. But it is possible that we can consume ourselves to death.
To feel the chill realization of your own frail humanity, I suggest wading into a cold spring wetland. And stand there a while. Listen to the call of frogs echoing to you through millions of years. And realize that all you’re really doing is standing on your own set of frog legs.
Following a late meeting last night, it was hard to get to sleep when I got home. So I toggled back and forth between a pair of movies on cable. They were right next to each other on the channels, so it wasn’t hard to do.
In her recovery from the murder attempt, the erstwhile bride lies comatose. A chauvinistically sick male attendant sees opportunity in her condition, and uses her for sex. It all serves as coarse symbolism for the manner in which so many men choose to treat women as a sexual and dispensable object. (Stormy Daniels anyone?) But the serial rapist pushes his “luck” too far when he decides to rent the comatose body of his victim out for cash to another craven suitor.
The other movie I watched was The Social Network. That’s the story of Mark Zuckerberg and how he created Facebook. The stunning part of movie was that Facebook as a “thing” only emerged in 2003. It’s only been that long? Well, that was fifteen years ago. Time flies when you’re Friending people.
The fascinating thing about these two seemingly unrelated movies is that they both begin and end as tales of revenge. Beatrix Kiddo wants to kill the people who tried to assassinate her. Mark Zuckerberg wants to “kill” anyone who gets in his way. The Winklevoss twins want financial revenge against Zuckerberg for ostensibly stealing their idea from them. Eduardo Saverin wants revenge for being cut out of the deal as Facebook grew into a giant company.
Yet after all those years, I still woke up in the middle of the night at age 29 pounding the pillow for some unknown reason. So I thought deeply about it, and came to the realization that in my past there was a single moment of fear and anger that drove my desire for revenge on the world. Much of it stemmed from an incident at the tender ago of seven when something in me broke inside at the sight of my brothers being thrashed by my dad for some act sort of insubordination.
Last fall I should have listened to my instincts and gone ahead with surgery on the torn meniscus in my left knee. It had been popping out some last summer, but when it stopped acting weird going into winter I thought perhaps that surgery wasn’t necessary. When I met with the doctors, they fairly warned me it was a “significant tear.’
That’s how it is with injuries. I wasn’t necessarily trying to hide from the fact that I was a member of the Walking Wounded. I’ve been through two (count ’em, two) torn ACL incidents. The first was profound during an indoor soccer match. It was traumatic, sudden and horribly life-changing.
Those stories were met with smiles and laughter. And there were serious discussions as well. How she’d been so strong through eight long years of cancer treatments. “She battled back from every round, her best friend shared, “Like a phoenix!”
Those of us who run and ride can appreciate some aspects of dealing with pain to get to a point of joy.
Cancer changes the people around those who are going through the struggle as well. My children kept close tabs on their mom, of course. They wanted to know how she was doing and trusted me to tell them. Yet she was resolute about what she was willing to share when things got tough at times.
See, Linda often teased me about what she called Golden Leg Syndrome. On the night before races I would seldom agree to go out and party or anything like it. I didn’t want my legs to feel dead from standing around some kitchen for three hours. I’d worked too hard to get into shape to waste it on some social occasion. And that’s the other thing I would not do; drink the night before an important race.
Starting a ride at 5:00 pm on a March evening when the temperature is just 48 degrees is a guarantee of one thing. It will get colder as you go. And sure enough, by the time I finished my ride in 1:45, the air had chilled to just 42 degrees and the wind had shifted slightly to the north.
Out on country roads, cyclists are regarded with disdain by many drivers, who seem to look at cyclists as an animated form of road kill, one of those necessary evils of driving on public roads. The attitude of road ownership is even more pronounced in semi-rural areas where the farming community faces its share of discrimination as suburban housing reaches into the fields. It all becomes a competitive battle for use of the roads.
Healthy hills
There is hardly a day on this earth when I don’t feel like expressing myself in some way. Whether through writing or art, photography or conversation, that’s the thing I live for.
I’m going to admit something to you. I’ve been on what amounts to a forty-year guilt trip. It all started when I was about fourteen years old. That’s when I seriously took up running in track and field and cross country. Much of the training for those sports takes place early in the morning or in the evening. Those also happen to be the best times for birding. 
But when spring comes around each year and birds migrate through our area, I feel guilty if I let the spring go by without finding some interesting species somewhere along the way. That means getting out the door by 6:00 am to get on site in time for the dawn chorus, or the departure of ducks from the wetlands. 
But as I type this, the calls of forty cranes have come down from the sky above. They are moving on a brisk spring day, headed to whatever breeding grounds they favor, likely to the far north. Their voices are built on 60M years of evolutionary change and development. But perchance they do not sound much different now than they did 10M or 30M years ago. 
Last night I parked the car at the train station so that my wife could drive it home after her commute. That gave me the chance to ride 20+ miles during the hour and a half of good light still available.
Because that’s not the case with my wife Sue, as we’ve worked out a system of riding together no matter what bike she’s on. I tend to ride in her draft on longer rides because I don’t ride with aero bars and she’s not interested in riding in my draft as a matter of training principles. So we share some of the pulls, but not too much. Many days she’s frankly stronger than me, but there are days when I end up guiding us home as well. Last summer we did rides of three and four and even five hours together. Not every second was perfect, but we also split off sometimes to get some riding in alone. Good partners know how to compromise. I think we do that well.
