Hearing Frog calls up close

From waconiapatriot.com
By Jim Gilbert

Cricket Frogs Calling

On warm spring days, and nights too, listen for the swamp cricket frogs, also known as chorus frogs, calling from grassy ponds and roadside ditches. We first heard them on March 23 when the air temperature went above 70 degrees F for the first time in 2003. The great volume of the mating tills produced by these tiny frogs, which have bodies a little over an inch long, suggests that it is coming from much larger frogs. The sound is like that of metallic clicker.

It’s the males that call, and I have watched them at night with the aid of hip boots and a flashlight.Only their tiny heads with extended bubble-like throat sacs stick up above the water. With many males calling in a small pond, their combined chorus is continuous and quite deafening, but in the daytime the slightest disturbance causes them to remain quiet. A person walking near a pond of singing frogs causes the chorus to stop short. However, if one is perfectly quiet and doesn’t move, soon an individual frog will begin singing, and in a few seconds the whole chorus will again be in full voice.