By T. Edward Nickens | June/July 2009 | 

The Frogloggers

To help monitor frog and toad populations, dedicated volunteers lend their ears to science

It is dark and a little bit rainy and just about that time of night when nice folks ought not be lurking by the roadside in the middle of the Virginia Piedmont. Just down the road, the kitchen light of a farmhouse glares at me. I shift my feet. The sound of a barking dog grows closer.

I quell my concern over pit bulls and shotguns stashed handily behind the front door and keep on counting. All around me is an ancient chorus, an unbelievably loud clamor of calling frogs and toads. Most I know pretty well. There is the clicking of innumerable cricket frogs, the frightening scream of Fowler’s toads, the banjo-string ploink of green frogs. But others are more difficult to parse. I strain to keep a reasonable accounting. It’s a good thing I’ve been training for this. My notepad is covered with columns of penciled hash marks. Now the house’s back porch light flicks on. The dog closes the distance. I glance at my watch: fifteen seconds more. I have work to do. I am a froglogger.

Troubled Waters

I’ve volunteered for the U.S. Geological survey’s North American Amphibian Monitoring Program. Dubbed the NAAMP, which sounds a bit like a frog’s lovelorn call, it’s a nationwide network of volunteers who comb darkened countrysides each spring and summer to shed light on the status of native frogs and toads. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that almost one-third of the world’s 5,743 known amphibian species are in danger of extinction. The perils arrayed against amphibians are legion—decreasing habitat, concerns of high amounts of ultraviolet radiation filtering through depleted ozone, water pollution, introduced aquatic predators, ever more roads and traffic and deadly tires.

In the Southeast, home to more than half of the nation’s five hundred species of amphibians and reptiles, a big warty pile of frogs and toads face an uncertain future. Pine Barrens tree frog, Florida bog frog, river frog, mountain chorus frog, barking tree frog, Houston toad, sheep frog, white-lipped frog—each is listed on the rare-species roster of at least one Southern state, and the status of others is still a mystery. “There are many species that we just don’t know where they exist on the scale of common to rare,” says Jeff Hall, a biologist for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and head of the state’s Calling Amphibian Survey Program. “We really need data over multiple years, and that is very labor intensive to collect.” Which is why volunteers like me cruise through farm country in the dead of night, hands wet and greasy from late-night meals of Cheerwine and fried pork skins.