TERRE HAUTE — It’s been most of two weeks ago now that my wife and I managed to get home early enough from work to walk our customary walk. The weather had warmed for a few days in this climatic seesaw we know as March, so for that evening anyway we donned our sweatshirts and walking shoes and headed down the road.
As we neared a spot where a yellow-clayed field drains into a damp copse of willows and white oaks, we heard a welcomed chorus of spring peepers, their familiar voices letting us know that although we had a few frosts and freezes left before the equinox officially arrived, for all intents and purposes, they were ushering in a newer, greener season.
We don’t have to find those shallow pools down the road to hear the frogs. A full-fledged wetlands and narrow pond below our hilltop house explodes with the little brown croakers each year as winter turns to spring. I do mean little, too; the typical adult peeper is anywhere from three-fourths of an inch to 11/2 inches long.
“I like to hear them,” my wife said as we tromped past the boggy choir that evening. “They’re a sign that spring is coming; they’re a sign that there’s hope,” she said. Hearing those peepers, I told her, must be part of the reward we get for enduring such long, hard winters…
Spring peepers, known scientifically as Hyla crucifer (Hyla means “tree frog;” crucifer means “cross-bearing” for peepers carry that mark on their backs) start their lives as tiny translucent, algae-eating tadpoles. Only the males sing — they’re really just trying to pick up young female peepers — and they differ from most frogs in that they have sticky little pads on each of their toes. Glands in the peepers’ feet secrete an adhesive onto the pads, making them the “Post-it Notes” of the natural world as they hang on the undersides of cattails and skunk cabbages and the long-dead stems of last year’s weeds.
Peepers don’t migrate; they don’t catch a plane for the coast or spend their winter months tanning in Mexico. They hibernate in the coldest weather under logs and loose bark, comatose and appetiteless. After their breeding season — March to June — they tend to hop away from permanent bodies of water lest they end up on the dinner plates of raccoons and skunks, snakes and herons. They primarily hang around our pond in March as if it is some spa for swinging singles.
As goofy as spring peepers may appear, they are one of the reasons we choose to live in the country. We do occasionally find ourselves snowed in, and we do have to drive a while to get to the market or mall, but the peepers and the coyotes, the deer and the green darners, always remind us how fortunate we are not to be looking at asphalt parking lots and garbage dumpsters from our windows. We hear those tiny peeping frogs when we step out onto our back deck and are welcomed by their voices as they’re carried on the breeze through our open windows. How lucky we are.
In his beautifully written book, “Small Creatures in Ordinary Places,” essayist Allen Young gives us many reasons why we should appreciate the peepers. He writes, “…consider the spring peeper, an ecological perfectionist who specializes in the art of the temporary … Often it is the smallest creatures that give us great insights into nature, for they function almost literally as the living bricks and mortar of a woodland, field, or forest network of spring pools.”
Young, like my wife and me, says that he loves to walk the woods in the spring: “At first, there appears to be nothing afoot and stirring. Then suddenly the air is filled with a symphony of peeper song and its hopeful message that life has survived the winter.”
The peepers are not a one-frog band at our pond, or in the countless other wet and muddy spots from the Gulf of Mexico south to Hudson Bay in the north. In our neck of the woods, we also hear green frogs and wood frogs and leopard frogs, the latter whose legs are a favored delicacy, although I’ve never been much interested in them. There are other species there, too, we’re sure, but although we can most certainly hear them, we rarely ever see them.
We also hear the big bullfrogs and their distinct “jug-o’-rum” call on warm summer mornings. They startle us when we walk the pond’s edge, and they blast-off into the water with a scream.
By midsummer, we see several varieties of tree frogs dangling from our house’s siding as they look for a meal near a porch light or storm window. Several years ago, we even had a pair of tree frogs take up residence in two bird boxes; how they eventually won out over their much larger winged competitors for the rental space we’ll never know.
But it is the peepers that we perhaps enjoy most of all. It’s not for their looks, either, for we can’t really find them. We love them because they are symbols of change, signs of the times, signal posts that suggest warm nights and green grass and longer walks.
Young warns us, however, that we are losing our frogs. He says, “As has recently come to light (he wrote his book in 2000), amphibians worldwide have been steadily vanishing since the 1960s. Because amphibians are good indicators of environmental damage — serving as the veritable canary in the coal mine — this is cause for serious alarm. Our forests are changing and not for the better … If the peeper music ever stops, fades away in springs to come, the earth is in big trouble.”
Soon, the peepers will be done with the serious fun of making a new generation of themselves, and they will grow silent and yield to the sounds of other animals around our pond. But our hope is always going to be that we’ll hear them again next spring as we shed our long-sleeved shirts and winter coats.
A new friend recently told me that the old-timers used to say that spring isn’t truly here until you’ve heard the peepers’ call twice. We’ve heard them more than that around my place.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail c/o the Tribune Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Learn more about his book, “The Off Season, The Newspaper Stories of Mike Lunsford,” at www.mikelunsford.com. He’ll be signing and reading from the book at 6:30 p.m. April 13 at the Clinton Public Library.
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