Virtually Home

Night on the frog pond is magical. Sure, it's kind of exhausting, tromping through thick, sticky mud and trying not to fall down. And if you're not careful with the bug spray, you'll lose a pint of perfectly good blood to mosquitoes on any given night. And it's often frustrating, particularly at this point in the breeding season, when (I'm told) there are fewer frogs to be caught and more effort has to be put in to every capture. But last night the moon was waning, half-full, and brilliantly orange on the horizon. The frogs were singing, in a chorus of more than one species. As I looked for gray treefrogs I found lurking green frogs and huge, conspicuous leopard frogs that stayed perfectly still until they were absolutely sure you saw them, then leapt into the water with an ungainly splash. There is the occasional toad floating on top of the water, spotted and glandular. You can pick them up, right off the surface of the water, without much trouble. They're ca...

Moving in worked out all right, for all that the apartment is in an old two-story building with no elevator and narrow staircases with no dedicated parking. We were able to park the UHaul on the side of the building (because there's no way we could have parallel parked it in front of the building with enough space to get the ramp out behind it). All the furniture I brought fit nicely into the apartment, and my windowsills are now full of herbs. I started work almost immediately in the lab, helping a post-doc run some phonotaxis experiments in one of the several sound chambers that belong to the lab. He ran the computers that simulate the signals and background noise, while I shuffled frogs back and forth from the incubator to the testing chamber. We're working with Hyla chrysoscelis , commonly called Cope's Gray Treefrog. It's pretty abundant and widely-distributed in the US. In Oklahoma, it's most often a mottled gray color (hence the name) but here in Minneso...