Frog watch

Volunteers count spring frog songs in the New River Valley

BLACKSBURG — The piercing whistle of thousands of frogs pulsed across the marshy bottomland of Heritage Park on Wednesday night.

Rarely seen but often heard in March, the spring peeper’s mating call is for many the sound of winter’s retreat. Up close, the singing of thousands of these randy amphibians can be deafening, and trying to sight them in thick marsh grasses after sunset can be maddening.

Standing knee-deep in a vernal pool of snow melt and rain, New River Valley Master Naturalist Shannon Ritter trained a bright beam on a damp hummock.

“Here’s one,” she said.

But the thick grasses thwarted its capture. It took the deft netting skills of Mike Pinder, Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist, to scoop up one of the inch-long amphibians for a gentle examination.

Virginia has designated 2015 the Year of the Frog, and the state’s annual Frog and Toad Calling Survey is underway. The spring surveys are full of the sound of the peepers. For the past two years, Ritter has volunteered to monitor a survey route in Floyd County — one of three such routes in the New River Valley area.

Three times a year — late winter, early spring and early summer — Ritter and other volunteers ply the backroads counting the number of identifiable frog calls at chosen spots across the commonwealth.

“The fun aspect of it is I love being aware of these seasonal changes — being aware of these little animals,” Ritter said. “It forces you to go out to these little remote places and to just stop and listen. And that’s something we don’t do enough of.”

The survey is a project of the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, which partners with states and the U.S. Geological Survey to establish and staff the survey routes with trained volunteers. Here, the VDGIF is the main partner, and the commonwealth has participated since 1999, said J.D. Kleopfer, VDGIF herpetologist-biologist.

NAAMP maintains a database of population information gleaned from the surveys done across the country, and the data is used for population monitoring and research.

Currently there are 27 volunteers counting frog songs in Virginia, but more are needed to fill empty routes, according to Travis Land, coordinator for the commonwealth’s survey.

Volunteers like Ritter — who works as a research specialist in Virginia Tech’s college of natural resources — go through about eight hours of training and are tested to ensure they can accurately identify the frog species native to their areas. They follow strict protocols in the field to make the data they collect scientifically valid, Land said.

Land is a herpetology curator at Virginia Living Museum in Newport News. And frogs are one of his passions.

“I’m really fascinated with amphibians. They are some of the weirdest animals we have living on the planet today,” Land said. “And I’m pretty weird myself, so I can identify.”

Tracking the data over the years has led to one overarching conclusion: “Amphibians are in trouble,” Land said. “What everybody is trying to find out is exactly what is happening. It’s different in different areas.”

In more developed places, habitat destruction and pollution seem to be the culprits. In other areas, disease is taking a toll. Depredation from invasive species harms populations. Roadways are a big contributor to decline, according to Land. The traffic noise interferes with the frogs’ mating calls, making it difficult for them to breed.

“There are a lot of things that are joining forces to act against amphibians,” Land said.

One particular species on the NAAMP radar in the Blue Ridge region of Virginia is the wood frog, and survey volunteers in those areas have been asked to keep a keen ear out for this earliest of the spring frog breeders. This species’ extreme cold tolerance makes it one of the most remarkable of the amphibians.

The wood frog’s range extends all the way to Alaska, in part because it is adapted to survive freezing nearly solid, shutting down its heart and brain function in the cold. But when it thaws out, the little frog hops away unhurt. Still, despite its amazing hardiness, scientists think it’s suffering.

“It’s not listed as threatened yet, but they are known to be susceptible to certain diseases,” Land said.

There was no sign of them Wednesday night in Heritage Park, but Ritter said she heard a wood frog earlier in the week.

Overall, Virginia’s 27 frog species are in good shape, relative to the about 50 percent of frog species that are imperiled around the world, Kleopfer said.

A handful of the commonwealth’s identified species may be in decline, he said. Diseases are the biggest threat, but deforestation and climate change are also major issues globally.

Frogs are cute. They’re interesting. People like to listen for them on a summer night. That’s why VDGIF’s “Frog Friday” Facebook campaign blew up earlier this year. It’s part of the Year of the Frog awareness campaign. Every Friday, the page profiles one of the Virginia frog species, or something related to their conservation.

Twenty-four hours after the first Friday posting, Kleopfer said it had 26,000 views, 165 likes and 250 shares.

But frogs are more than popular. They’re valuable.

“They are one of the best indicators of what’s going on out in the environment, and what’s going on in your water,” Kleopfer said. “They are a foundation food source for mammals, birds, reptiles and even other amphibians.”

Frogs do a large amount of pest control work, eating a lot of insects, he said. And much medical and scientific research requires frogs.

“We’d be in tough shape without them,” Kleopfer said.

There may be good news for frog lovers on the horizon: Virginia is working on describing a new species in the state.

The Atlantic Coast leopard frog was first described decades ago in New York, but it wasn’t considered a mid-Atlantic species.

Kleopfer said in 2012 he heard an unusual frog chorus in Virginia, and mentioned it to a colleague at a herpetological meeting. Together they wondered if it could be the leopard frog.

It’s not uncommon to hear about new species of animals being found in rural South America or other exotic locales, Kleopfer said.

But most people don’t think of new species being found on the heavily urbanized East Coast.

Photographic evidence and analysis of the leopard frog’s call so far point to it being resident in the commonwealth.

But Kleopfer said he’s waiting on genetic testing to confirm it.