Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 26, 1995 TAG: 9503290003
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEVE KARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Sealed indoors, I'd missed the exact day of their arrival last spring. But this year, because the weather's been so mild, I heard them begin calling through the open bedroom window about a week ago. Unless you've heard them yourself, I'd have a difficult time describing the exquisite charm of their song - which some say sounds like jingling bells. Although temporary and wonderfully appealing in itself, there is something else in it too that is timeless. It suggests the stubborn vitality of all living things, which conveniently includes, as I see it, old romantics like me.
It's late afternoon and I'm headed down through the woods, following the sound of the peepers below me. I want to see if I can spot any of the little frogs, which are brown and usually no more than an inch-and-a-half long and easily identified by the X mark on their backs.
These fragile creatures spend the winter sleeping beneath the insulating debris of fallen trees and leaf litter. Then, remarkably, each spring some instinctual whisper sends them hopping toward their breeding pools.
Unless the timing is perfect, their efforts will be fatal. Peepers and other wood frogs breed in temporary pools, which fill during spring rains but quickly dry up as the hot days of summer approach.
By laying their eggs in this way, the frogs avoid having them eaten by fish and other stream-borne predators, which cannot survive in the unpredictable temporary pools.
Generally, the eggs take a week or two to hatch and another two to three months for the water-breathing tadpoles to change to air-breathing frogs. If the timing is off or the weather unusually dry, the immature tadpoles will die as the pool evaporates around them.
Under the conditions set by such a delicate balance, their return year after year is a convincing example of life's fragile yet persistent nature.
Their transformation from swimmers to hoppers never has failed to astonish me. As a child, I was fascinated by anything faintly dinosaurian. What could be more primordial than the growth of legs on these tiny fishlike creatures and their eventual, clumsy emergence onto dry land as mature frogs?
The events at the edge of this inconsequential, little pool will duplicate those that occurred 400 million years ago when ancient amphibians first emerged from a Devonian swamp and set the clock in motion for all land-dwelling vertebrates, including me and these stupid dogs.
The dogs have a vitality all their own, which has little regard for my contemplations or for the delicate existence of these tiny creatures.
Before I can stop them, they have splashed out into the water, mucking it up and making it thoroughly impossible for me to tell if there's anything there but dogs.
My investigation of the peepers has gone to the dogs.
by CNB