Many contest my ID as a red-legged frog! But nobody can explain massive size of this “tree frog”
Last night, Linda found this big beautiful California frog crawling up our back door frame. I think it’s a female and maybe full of eggs. Her body was more than 3 inches long. I have seen these pink-red bellied large frogs for years around here. But whenever I have shown a picture of them to people, or on GOOGLE, it comes up as chorus frog or Pacific Tree frog. However, there is NO SUCH THING as a chorus frog as big as this. We have hundreds of those chorus frogs as well as this larger species. Many people have contested some of the markings as being off. A cross breed? Since I was a kid, I have run into scientists absolutely sure their guidebooks and training is right. When I was a forest roaming pre teen (and all the way into my 20s) I had sightings of a mountain lion on my grandparents farm in Illinois. I never saw it but found a fresh and partly eaten deer kill and lion tracks and once it was right behind me and vocalized. No doubt what it was.
But no kid, there is no such thing. Can’t you read? It must be a coyote or something in our guide book. As a reporter in Ohio I documented many stories of pumas in the woods of West Virginia and Southern Ohio. All were ignored and nobody believed them.
Then one day, they admitted there were lions in the Midwest and probably always had been. Funny, same thing happened in the UK.
And everything I have experienced since shows me if you challenge the prevailing wisdom, you get some surefooted replies. And they may be right.
The giant salamanders also live in our pond. Once I found a “nest” of like 100 of what I call red-legged frogs, but for the most part, they are greatly outnumbered and outsung by our population of tree frogs that seem misnomered as they only rarely are found in the trees. Most of the time, they are in the pond. They are tiny, lively and here, bright green or almost yellow.
In April, they make the pond sound like the speakers at a 1970s Jefferson Airplane concert, back when they used to think it cool to make their instruments sound like an airplane landing. LOUD!!! I have been told these are NOT California Red Legged Frogs. And when I put the picture in searches, it comes up as a tree frog. Only this girl is 3.5 inches of body. Impossible for a tree frog!
I’m going to try to attach a recording.
The red-legged frogs eat the tree frogs but the tree frogs are way more nimble and few get eaten. There is tons of food in the pond, especially insects so everybody we find is fat and happy. For some reason, one tree frog comes into our house every year and sings among the books. Back in the day, my dad would try to find the little guy and tear up the bookshelf. Of course, he goes quiet, then you sit back down, and he starts serenading again. Only once or twice have we ever found him over the decades since 1986 here. Why every year and why only one, i can only wonder.
Linda didn’t think we should do the traditional plop! back into the pond treatment for our visitor last night. Leave her alone! Maybe she lays eggs in the rain gutter or something.
Nearly every year, the invasive species from the Midwest, the bullfrog, arrives. He is credited with helping push the red-legged frog and other native species onto the endangered species list.
As soon as he arrives here, he begins eating red-legged frogs and everything else in our pond. When his big bull-like croak is heard, all the frogs go silent.
He is 5x bigger than the red legged frog and that is the cause of his demise. He never lasts more than a month until he becomes a very juicy dinner for the great blue heron who claims ownership of the pond, a fox, racoon, owl, bobcat or the resident red-shouldered hawk, who really hates that heron also.
Red-legged frogs are an illustration of the gap between reality, science and common sense to me. We have the tree frogs here but if you ask someone in the science community they will say these cannot be red legged frogs. But everything I have seen or read says this is a California Red Legged Frog. Her huge size precludes tree frogs. Could there have been a cross breeding? The tree frogs are usually about an inch body and are much brighter green here.. Taken with all the other issues that make no sense, it all drove me batty when I tried to report on it.
Look up red legged frogs on Google search. The vast majority of sites say the frog does not exist in Mendocino County, which is supposedly at the north end of its historic range. I dont know whether to believe that either.
The red legged frog is on the endangered species list as threatened. Most of them were killed off in the Central Valley, where the annual harvest of them for frog legs was 40,000 at one time.
Pesticides and wetlands conversion were a bigger factor in their loss.
The site below is great but also informs us…”Remaining populations of the red-legged frog are found mostly in three California counties: Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo. The frog’s historical range extended from the vicinity of Point Reyes National Seashore, Marin County, California, coastally, and from the vicinity of Redding, Shasta County, California, inland south to northwestern Baja California, Mexico.”
California Red Legged Frog | Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
The next site is better, but still doesnt include the possibility of red legged frogs in Mendocino County.
California Red-legged Frog (Rana draytonii) | Map | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service | FWS.gov
My pet peeve, ever since I started covering environmental issues in the early 1980s is the repeated assertion that the red legged frog is the jumping frog of Calaveras County in Mark Twain’s famous story. Look in any encyclpedia and even published scientific journal and this “fact” is repeated.
The story is two guys talking in a bar about something that could never, ever happen but they believe it and take turns exaggerating it. The frogs referenced in the made-up stories are clearly bullfrogs, which Twain knew well from his time on the MIssissippi River. They have giant mouths, and sometimes kids have been known to put stuff inside them through that giant door. I never did. I beat up my cousin who abused a frog when I was like 6 years old. I always hated that kind of stuff, but have seen it done. Read the story and then laugh at our science and reality a bit.
Ok, I just found out that the Tsunami drill did NOT include the sirens this year. I guess we will never know if the broken one at Pudding Creek works It came over my phone and computer! Dont worry it was a drill!! WE live in Cleone at sea level amost. OMG IM DROWNING!!! BBBBBbbbbbbgulp!
