Frogs and The Sounds of Summer: Our Family Study

This post has been a long time coming. We worked on this last week and the week before that knowing we had a frog study as part of the Outdoor Hour Challenge. We must be having an unusual year because we have not seen a single frog this summer except when we were at Yosemite on our camping trip. We saw a Pacific Tree frog but did not photo because he hopped right up to my foot and I was actually trying to catch him but he got away. He sure could jump!

On a normal summer evening we can sit out on our back deck and hear frogs in the evening as they croak and rib-bit. We took a walk around our neighborhood and found out that the little wetland area at the end of the school soccer field that usually has cattails and frogs this time of year was dried up. They must have come up with a way to drain the area and it is now not fit for cattails and frogs. I am a little sad.

So did we learn something during this challenge even though we never found any frogs? We benefited from two complete walks looking for frogs in our neighborhood and although we were not “successful”, we did learn more about our local frogs. We took some time to research exactly what kind of frogs we should be looking for in our area. We found that there is a species of frog that is endangered, the California red-legged frog.(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

We also have the Sierra Tree Frog and the Sierran Tree Frog (working on figuring out the difference), as well as the Foothill yellow-legged frog.

We enjoyed learning some more information about frogs from the Handbook of Nature Study too and some of the facts are now filed away for future reference.