
If Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he would be a good friend of Paul’s — never mind how loud he was at night.

Photo by Mark Fleming
My in-laws don’t need to go a-roving to hear peepers. They live across the road from a wooded wetland where amphibians of all kinds hold their annual love-ins. On certain nights, the racket emanating from that marshy hollow is enough to make my mother-in-law pull the pillow over her head.
To the untrained ear, the noises coming from vernal pools can sound discordant — a jug band cacophony — but learning to identify the individual species you’re hearing isn’t as hard as you might imagine.
The first thing you should know is that frogs have more singing voices than the entire cast of the Metropolitan Opera. Spring peepers, of course, have such high-pitched shrills it’s hard to believe those peeps could be emanating from creatures smaller than your thumbnail. Bullfrogs, meanwhile, are the baritones of the amphibian world: Imagine the sound a large, sleeping man might make if you taped wax paper over his snoring mouth. (Don’t try that at home!) Green frogs, the species most familiar to golfers who can’t keep their balls out of water hazards, have a call that’s somewhere between a hiccup and the plucked string of a washtub bass. Wood frogs quack. Leopard and pickerel frogs are melodic burpers. Mink frogs, found in the northern part of the state, can sound like a barrage of distant fireworks — Pop! Pop! Pop! — echoing across the pond. Gray tree frogs make a trilling noise, as do American toads. These two species can be hard to tell apart, although the toad trill has more of a whirring quality to my ears, like a kitchen appliance heard from another room.
What Spring in Maine Sounds Like
Video by mudranger
And individual frogs can be full of surprises. As a boy, I spent an unhealthy amount of time in pursuit of cold-blooded creatures. If it slithered, squirmed, or was covered in slime, I wanted an up-close look at it. There were particularly good hunting grounds across the road from our camp near Poland Spring. If I say that the bullfrogs that lived in that dark swamp were as big as human babies, I am only slightly exaggerating. Even more surreal, those Brobdingnagian frogs would open their mouths and cry like infants when I picked them up. The bloodcurdling noise was their way of getting me to drop them back into the mud — and believe me, I did. Memories of that sound still send shivers through me, 40 years later.
Since amphibians take in water through their thin skins, they are especially sensitive to pollutants — like lead and mercury — in the environment. Parents, take it from me: a place where frogs can’t survive is not a place you want your children playing. So when you hear spring peepers in full throat this month, take a moment to give thanks to these coal-mine canaries. And then feel free to pull the pillow over your ears.
Photo: Deer Pond in the Great Northern Maine Woods, August 2014 — by JoAnne Lambdin.
See more Room With a View!
The post Divos of the Wetlands appeared first on Down East.