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Sanctuary magazine
Editor's Column
Twilight of the Frogs
by John H. Mitchell
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Go Back
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Some years ago on Boston Common I met a man named Earl, whose "home," as he called it, was under one of the bridges of the Bowker Overpass, along the Charles River. Earl told me that one night in April, as he was headed home along the Fenway, he heard the sound of sleigh bells ringing in the empty sky.
Earl was not a man who was opposed to the occasional recreational use of controlled substances, and, as he admitted, he first thought he was hallucinating. This was, after all, April, and Santa Claus was busy elsewhere in the North. "I couldn't figure out what the hell it was," Earl said.
Having heard similar stories on other occasions, I told him that he was quite well grounded in reality, and what he had heard was the sound of spring peepers calling from one of the marshes along the Muddy River.
I heard a similar tale from a newly arrived urbanite in our semirural town about a flock of invisible ducks. Said ducks were residents of a shallow pond in back of my new neighbor's house. There were many of them, and they were calling loudly, but, when the neighbor snuck up on them, they fell silent. They also disappeared.
"No ducks anywhere" he explained. "Just quiet waters, as if they had all taken flight."
"Wood frogs," I told him.
Such stories and others like it are the stuff of the first warming days of spring. Wood frogs, the first frogs to call, begin singing (if you can call it that) as early as the beginning of March in some locations. One year I even heard them in February. Spring peepers will begin calling whenever the water of their breeding rises above 45 degrees; in fact, spring peepers have been recorded singing in every month of the year. I heard them once on an unusually warm day during the January thaw some years ago.
The spring voices of frogs, along with the hooting of great horned owls, and the spring songs of chickadees and titmice, are among the first sounds of spring. And in the case of frogs, the sounds must have been, in a sense, the first voices of the primordial earth.
For many, this first damp voice of life after the deathly silence of winter is a signature of hope, a sign of endurance and regeneration. Even though the songs sound out on the darkest rainiest nights of late winter, and even though there will be periods of cold, wet snow, and sleet and, in some years, even blizzards, frog song in spring offers hope.
Not everyone reads such a message in this first voice of the earth, however. The botanist Donald Culross Peattie, author of the once-popular daybook of nature An Almanac for Moderns (1935) read ominous warnings in the calling of spring peepers from the marshes of the Potomac, near his home. He foresaw in that ancient music the inhuman and irrepressible forces of reproduction, the benign indifference of the universe. It was his belief that long after human beings had "shattered and eaten and debauched" themselves by their folly, the cold-blooded voices of frogs would still ring out from the marshes of the world.
As we now know, he was right on one count. Human folly is threatening the very mechanics of the atmosphere, in the form of, among other devastating prospects, global climate change. But Peattie was wrong on another count. Frogs themselves are succumbing to a variety of ill-understood pressures that are causing their decline throughout the world.
Frogs evolved about 200 million years ago during the early jurassic era. As Peattie writes, their voices must have been some of the first sounds heard on earth.
Frogs have endured massive continental shifts, worldwide droughts, long periods of volcanism, falling seas and rising seas, periods of global warming, and many seemingly endless ages of ice. But only now in the past four or five decades, to our knowledge, have their numbers suffered. The reasons for the decline are multiple: disease, pollution, a thinning of the ozone layer, habitat loss, and perhaps some other as-yet-undiscovered threat.
Their spring call, as Peattie suggested, has a dark ring, a bell tolling for an empty planet. It appears that, unless some solution—or solutions in this case—can be found, the old axiom that holds that the first shall be last will not be true.
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