A couple of days ago the peepers started to call. Their piercing notes always begin to rise in a perpetual chorus from the wetlands near the front of our house in the days before the vernal equinox. And that sound won’t cease for several weeks.
It is an annual rite of spring. Thousands of these little chorus frogs gather near every marsh in this area as soon as the last ice melts. And there the males inflate the bladders in their necks and begin to call.
The nature writer Joseph Wood Krutch wrote of the spring peeper’s call, “…I wonder if there is any phenomenon in the heavens above or in the earth beneath which so simply and so definitely announces that life is resurgent again.”
My oldest, who has a bedroom at the front of our house, claims their incessant peeps, a sound some compare to little bells but I consider closer to the cry of a chicken hatchling, drive her crazy and thwart her sleep.
I understand her antipathy. After a few days the unending nocturnal noise can be irritating. But their dedication is admirable; it dwarfs their diminutive stature.
Though tiny, average 1-1.5 inches in length, the Northern Pseudacris crucifer crucifer are loud. Their cries, when made in sufficient numbers, can be heard up to two miles away.
And they have a won’t quit attitude. They stay awake night and day for the first few weeks after waking from icy hibernation, alternately hunting and singing. Though it seems like they never shut up, their vocalizations begin near dusk and carry through past dawn.
And what are all these guy frogs going on about? Love. Well, reproduction or perpetuation of the species, it we must be prosaic and Darwinian. But I like to think of them as tiny terminators of love. Like Schwarzenegger’s famous cyborg, they won’t stop, they won’t every stop.
What sounds to us like a piercing peep is actually frog-speak for: Love me. I will love you.
And they shout that out without ceasing through nights that sometimes fall back past freezing until a companion finds them.
Love me. Love me. Love me, they proclaim. I will love you, love you, love you.
The only things that will stop them are meeting a mate or death.
Sure, those lady frogs have standards. Size does matter even in the amphibian world. And the boy with the biggest voice sac is more likely to get a girl. But hope springs eternal for each and every one of the guys. They seem to suffer no crisis of insecurity or feelings of inadequacy, they don’t weep for being ignored or consider suicide because someone else got the one with those sweet crooked legs that they had their eye on.
Nothing stops their song and, eventually, they seem convinced, their one voice will rise above the cacophony of their companions, at least to the ears of one special lady.
Then they will be satisfied.
And with that satisfaction will come silence.
Recent Comments