Pfeiffer Nature Center & Foundation » frogs

It’s Your Call Challenge

Peg Cherre — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:25:15 +0000

Springtime brings us lots of sounds that we don’t hear the rest of the year. Geese honk overhead, peepers peep and wood frogs chortle in the wetlands. Barred owls mating calls range from their typical “Who cooks for you” to something that sounds (to me) more like laughing hyenas. Towhees admonish us to drink our tea, tufted titmice shout for Peter, and the warblers sing their little hearts out.

All those nature calls led us to create an It’s Your Call challenge for all of our friends, volunteers, members, hikers, and blog readers. Come up with your own springtime “call” for the Nature Center. Your call won’t be auditory, instead it will be verbal. Actually, written.

Your call will be something that represents the Nature Center. It might be words that make you think of us or sounds that you hear in our woods. You might choose a few words that will make people want to hike our trails or visit our programs, or a call to action for the environment. You may have another creative way to interpret what a Pfeiffer Nature Center ‘call’ is.

Most animals have relatively short calls, so in keeping with that concept, you’re limited to a maximum of 43 characters, including spaces. You may want to think of it as a dramatically reduced tweet. Why 43? That’s how many characters are in our full name: Pfeiffer Nature Center and Foundation, Inc.

Send in as many calls as you’d like by April 30. Submit your calls as a comment on this post, email your calls to me – director (at) pfeiffernaturecenter (dot) org, leave them on our answering machine (716-933-0187), or send them to me on a postcard (PO Box 802, Portville, NY 14770).

I’ll post all the entries on this blog in early May. We’ll come up with a cool prize for the winner.

Here are two quite different calls to get you started:

A possible tag-line call, only 34 characters: Celebrate nature, share the wonder
A call that begs to be said out loud, only 15 characters. Said/sung to the tune of the Rufous-sided Towhee’s call: PNC, it’s for me!

Have fun with this!

Tadpole Update

Peg Cherre — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:02:40 +0000

6/30 Update: Dr. Peter Ducey from SUNY Cortland graciously responded to our request for tadpole ID, indicating that likely candidates are wood frogs and american toads. I’m quite sure they’re not toads due to the shapes of the egg masses, so we’re left with wood frogs, one of my initial guesses. I found a site with a photo of a wood frog tadpole that confirms this. (Try not to think about how he got that picture.)

I took Kenton & Rebecca’s suggestion, and this morning captured a few tadpoles in a clear plastic container. Again. For the third time. I carried them to my sugar house, where it’s nice and dark.

And then back out into the early morning sunshine.

It’s now perfectly clear – those tadpoles are indeed iridescent, not luminescent.

I STILL don’t know what kind of frogs they’ll turn into, however, so still looking for your information.

by Peg Cherre, Executive Director

Tadpole Tales

Peg Cherre — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:05:02 +0000

Tadpoles - captured momentarily for this photo opp

There’s a ditch near my house that is home to MANY tadpoles. I stop and watch them every day on my walk. Earlier in the season I would have told you that they were probably either wood frog or peeper tadpoles since I saw both of those little spring singers in that ditch, but I’ve long since changed my mind.

Why? I think these little swimmers are too big as tadpoles to grow into those small frogs. Also, they’ve been in the tadpole stage since early May, and they’ve only just begun to sprout the smallest of hind legs in the last few days. Although my National Audubon Society Field Guide to Reptiles & Amphibians doesn’t give me information about tadpoles, I think this is too long for wood frogs and peepers.

I’ve worried about them several times, when the water in that ditch was dwindling, but they’ve lucked out each time with a nice rain.

Most amazing of all is the visual for these spermy-looking critters. I first noticed it on my visit to the ditch in late May. It was also late in the afternoon – on my after-work walk with my dog. Some of the tadpoles were swimming up to the surface of the water — to eat, I assumed — and when they did, their little undersides were luminous! They were glowing orange! To me they looked much as bright and clear as the little orange nightlight I have near my bathroom.

Tadpoles glowing in the ditch

Well, I ran home and got my camera and tried to capture this amazing sight. Mostly I got nothing usable — this was the best I could do that afternoon.

I did an online search for bioluminescent tadpoles, and the only reference I found was for a frog that lives out west somewhere. I did find one reference that said that wood frog tadpoles were iridescent.

So I kept visiting the ditch daily, trying to figure out if what I was seeing was iridescence or luminescence. I couldn’t decide. So one day I captured some in a clear plastic container and drove them a few miles to my friend’s house. It was a dreary, rainy day, and the little guys were understandably more than a little freaked out by their kidnapping and transport. We looked at them for a bit and couldn’t decide, so I drove them back home and put them back in their ditch. (I’m guessing they had some great stories to tell their friends, but that they weren’t believed.)

Tadpoles aglow in the dish

Then today I got the brainstorm to go back to the ditch with the plastic container and my camera. If I could hold the plastic container up in the air with one hand and aim and focus the camera on the bottom of the container with the other, maybe I could capture their light. Although this photo isn’t wonderful and their color looks much more white than orange, I think you’ll get the idea that these are some pretty unusual tadpoles, indeed.

I am truly hoping that someone who reads this post will know about these tadpoles, and can fill me in. Please post a comment and give me information!

by Peg Cherre, Executive Director