Amphibians – Boolie

800 Pounds, At Least

A couple of weeks ago my wife mentioned our dog Bear was interested in something outside and even our cat Trixie was pawing at the door. She hadn’t seen anything outside so I grabbed a small flashlight to have a look, mostly worried a neighborhood dog or cat had gotten loose but also hoping for a glimpse of a bobcat or coyote. I could hear something moving in the yard but my brain couldn’t place the sound with anything familiar and the sweep of my flashlight revealed no clues.

I turned the corner of our garage and couldn’t process what I was seeing. There at my feet was something with the look of a toad but the size of a bullfrog. Despite clearly being alive my brain kept thinking it was a ceramic toad someone left on our doorstep, as though that was a more likely alternative than a living, breathing giant toad in our yard.

I went inside to grab my camera and came out moving gingerly to avoid disturbing it, though it didn’t seem too bothered by me. I put the flashlight on the ground to illuminate it and took a quick shot before leaving it be. After giving it room to hop into the yard I noticed a visibly smaller toad a few feet away that would still have been the largest toad I had ever seen were it not for the behemoth I had just photographed.

I turned out the light and just listened for a while to the sound of an 800 pound toad (an estimate, I didn’t weigh it) hopping across the stones in the dark. I went inside and got out “A Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles in Arizona” by Thomas Brennan and Andrew Holycross and without even looking at the pictures just scanned the words, skipping past the toad descriptions that began “A small” or “A medium” and stopping as soon as I read “The largest toad in the United States”. Their picture matched mine and knew my first amphibian in the desert was a Sonoran Desert toad.

At first I was disappointed it wasn’t a more scenic shot but I came to love that our door is visible behind it as this is the same spot last year where I saw my first black witch, a previously unknown-to-me species that like this toad is not only the biggest in our land but is so big my eyes couldn’t see what they were seeing. I also saw my first kingsnake in the bushes to my left and have seen our native gecko here (my first sighting of one was in our backyard though). I’ve not tried identifying the bats that sometimes hang out here. Nor the giant crab-like spider I saw walking upside down, I didn’t look long as I already have enough trouble sleeping at night. Javelina and bobcat come through here too.

I won’t be surprised if next summer I step outside and see a sixty foot rattlesnake or some other behemoth I didn’t know existed. I mean I will be surprised but …

Brown Beauty in the Green

One of the areas I knew I would miss most when leaving Oregon was the Columbia River Gorge, a lush area of forest and waterfalls just half an hour’s drive from our urban Portland neighborhood. I usually went to Ridgefield when I wanted wildlife and the Gorge when I wanted trees and streams, but sometimes the Gorge had its own animals to share. This little beauty hidden below the dense undergrowth along the Horsetail Falls Trail is (I think) a red-legged frog, taken in the fall of 2011. Easily one of my favorite trails anywhere, I didn’t get to go late in our time in Oregon as it closed after devastating fires, but if I ever make it back it will be high on my list of places to visit.

An ant is starting to walk onto the frog in the picture below.

Frosted Newt

My favorite creature of the Pacific Northwest, a rough-skinned newt, is covered with grains of sand making it look like it was frosted with powdered sugar. Predators with a sweet tooth should take note of the bright orange coloring however as it is a warning the newts can be toxic if ingested. Taken in 2006 on a return trip to William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, a favorite hiking spot when we lived further south in Oregon. With today’s cameras I could have both gotten this shot much more easily and with more depth-of-field, but it’s still a nice reminder of my longtime home and neighbors.

Vertical Climber

A Pacific treefrog sits vertically in a moss-covered tree, all soaked with rain on an October morning, beside the trail to the observation blind at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. I was crestfallen when I realized I had forgotten my tripod and wouldn’t be able to photograph the frog (and another nearby on the same tree), but then I remembered I had my adapter to put Canon lenses on my Sony camera and thus was able to use both my Canon macro lens and the image stabilization of the Sony. It saved the day and thankfully so, it turned out to be the last time I saw them before leaving the Northwest.

Predator v. Predator

Bullfrogs are voracious predators and not native to the Northwest but they are also a food source for a variety of animals that have learned to eat them. This large bullfrog was I think killed by a family of otters that came through earlier, it looked like one of them had caught the frog and eaten its front legs and a bit near the back before leaving. The heron was happy to eat what the otters left, dunking the frog a couple of times in the water (birds like herons and bitterns do this at times with their prey when near water) before getting it positioned in its beak where it could swallow the frog whole.

Are You Hoarse?

No but I do have a frog in my throat.

Death of a Salamander

While I normally like to arrive before sunrise, I got a late start to my visit to the refuge in late February, as I was tired and decided to sleep in, arriving after noon. There was a great egret at the edge of Horse Lake, right at the start of the auto tour, so I pulled over and set up to take portraits since it wasn’t on the hunt.

Or so I thought.

Unfortunately my camera wasn’t set up for action as the egret suddenly struck into the water and brought up this northwestern salamander. I’ve rarely seen these lovely salamanders, and only when they’re being eaten, as the terrestrial form (adults can be aquatic or terrestrial) is usually below ground. During breeding season they move to the water to breed, and I believe late February is prime mating season for these salamanders at sea level, so hopefully it had a chance to pass on its genes before the egret caught it. I’ve never seen one this large, I was rather taken aback when I saw what it was.

When i first saw the white spots running from the head of the salamander down to its tail, I assumed it was part of its coloration and was confused when I later read that this is not the case. I couldn’t see that it could be any other species, but then I read that the white spots are poison that the salamander releases as a defense mechanism.

I don’t know if it explains something I found a little odd, as when the egret first caught the salamander it brought it out of the water and tossed it several yards away into the grass. It seemed rather upset and agitated with the salamander, perhaps I thought because the salamander’s long tail kept thrashing back towards the egret’s eyes, and I thought to myself, “Well, you are trying to eat it!”, but perhaps it was upset because it got a taste of the poison.

The egret grabbed and tossed the salamander multiple times, I was surprised at how long the little thing put up a fight. The egret’s first strike had opened a hole in the salamander’s side and some of its internal organs had come out, so it was going to die even if it managed to get away, so I wished I could tell it to just give up and its agony would end. Eventually it did stop fighting as much and the egret gave it a good dunking in the water, after which the salamander’s body went limp and its legs hung to its sides. The egret swallowed it in one fell swoop. I wonder now, although probably much too large to be killed by the poison, if it made the egret sick, and perhaps it might give the next salamander a pass.

After I got over the thrill of seeing this magnificent little creature and the shock of watching it die, I reflected on how amazing it is that, just feet from where I have spent many, many hours sitting and watching and listening at this pond, an entire world exists under the water that I have little knowledge of and no way to observe. I would have never known this magnificent salamander was there if not for the egret (this wider view of Horse Lake shows the egret not long before it caught the salamander, just over to its left).

Above the water I can watch and learn, but the things below I see only when they are brought out from the water and into the air, usually as they die. That makes me a little sad, but this encounter did encourage me to learn about the salamanders as I knew nothing about them before, apart from the name. Their numbers declined by one that day, but the northwestern salamander population in general is doing well in its range on the western edge of North America, from northern California up through British Columbia.

Maybe one day we’ll meet on friendlier terms. In the meantime it makes me happy knowing they are there, even if I can’t see them.

It also made me happy to see that, a while back, one of my pictures was used for the good of salamanders, as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service used my favorite rough-skinned newt picture on their Facebook page to announce some steps they are taking to protect our salamanders from a fungus that is killing them elsewhere. I like how Flickr displays the usage rights I set for my pictures, as I set most of them so they can be used for non-commercial purposes, a long-standing tradition dating back to when I first started putting my pictures online back in the mid-90’s.

Surviving and Not Surviving into the New Year

A shoveler swims past late in the day on New Year’s Eve of 2014, meaning she likely survived into the new year. The little bullfrog below almost made it into the new year but an egret plucked it from the shadows shortly before sunset. The bullfrogs move pretty slowly in the cold of winter and if spotted are easy pickings for the egrets and herons and bitterns that patrol these shores.

When Two Frogs Love Each Other Very Much …

These mating bullfrogs were serenely floating in the water while around them was chaos, with males playing leapfrog and wrestling each other into submission and croaking loudly. The male here is the one on top with his characteristic yellow throat and large tympani (the eardrums, the big circles behind the eyes). The water was mostly still but there was a subtle current and they both used their webbed rear feet to control their speed and balance. They don’t have webbing on their front toes, so the female used her front legs to maintain balance while the male has his wrapped around her body.

Catch, Dunk, Swallow

They say pictures never lie but they can certainly give the wrong impression. This American bittern, swallowing a treefrog it just caught, caught it further away from the water but came down to the water, dunked it, and swallowed it. As adults treefrogs often live near water but spend most of their time on land (and more often near the ground rather than in trees). The bittern has covered both its eyes with a nictitating membrane to protect them as it flips the frog down towards its throat.