Frogs are a sign of safety

Pacific Treefrog © AFengler

At twilight each night, starting sometime in March if the weather is just right, the air is filled with the cri-ck-ick-iick of little frogs. They sing with a desperation I struggle to put to words, but it is clear that they will sing and sing until love comes their way.

And is it even love they want, or is it simply companionship for tonight? I’m not one to judge. It’s cold outside in March. I’d want someone to cuddle with, too.

Around my neighborhood there are little wild spaces, intentional “drainage ponds” or little creeks wandering downhill toward Puget Sound. There are even some marshy wetlands that are mostly undisturbed. I’m not going to pretend that any of that space is what it was before developers showed up in the 1970s to build houses.¹

These frogs are shifty characters. Get too close and they’ll freeze in place, soundless, undetectable for their camouflaged skin. *This isn’t the frog you’re looking for. Move along now.*

Still, I try to find them when I can. There is something incredibly appealing about finding critters that I cannot resist. It’s something I should have outgrown, but I never wanted to let that fascination go. Growing up in the Midwest meant jars full of fireflies, preying mantises so big they could lop off your finger, little garden lizards that would shed their tail if you grabbed them, and black widows on webs strung between cornstalks where we ran to chase one another. I used to ride my bike up to the nearest crick (a crick is officially smaller than a creek) to fish out jars of crawdads to bring home. The habitats I built for them were mostly wet graves. They never lived more than a few days. I even collected the exoskeletons of cicadas off the tree bark.

Yeah. Gross.

The frogs around here are Pacific treefrogs (Pseudacris regilla), sometimes known as the Pacific chorus frog or Spring Peepers. They’re small – less than two inches from snout to cute little frog butt – but impossible not to hear when a group of them gets going with their evening croaking. Sometimes they wake us up in the night from their persistent crick-songs.

But that didn’t happen for the first five years we lived here.

Allow me to draw for you a mental image of my yard. If we begin at the perimeter of the house, you’ll find a concrete patio in back and an asphalt driveway out front. Hardscaping connects those spaces. On the far end, a longer distance from the bedrooms, the house protrudes directly into the garden (specifically the section we refer to as “woodpatch” because of all the decaying wood chips and debris we found there when we started that part of the garden). Beyond the patio is an expanse of (lumpy) lawn (thanks, groundhog asshole), and then a newly established band of native plants and trees. The yard boundary is safely caged in chain link, which no frog ever noticed as it hopped on through.

Past the fence is a wild, untamed section of woodlot owned by the elementary school my children attend. It is complete with an outdoor classroom and some short trails that haven’t been well tended to since before the pandemic, so calling it overgrown is a vast understatement. And at the edge of that terrain is a creek which flows from the nearby lake where we kayak. If you walk on the school trails you can usually hear the frogs. And for five years that was as close as we could get to hearing them near our yard.

The 5th frog discovered in the greenhouse this spring.

I’ve been gardening since before I had a house and my own yard to work with. Despite my upbringing in Indiana, surrounded by corn and soybeans soaked in Round-up, it simply never crosses my mind to use chemicals to kill things outdoors. Really not even indoors. When we get infestations of aphids, we acknowledge that the plant is weak or sick, and we leave it to die. The collection of aphids often attracts ladybugs, and these types of problems balance themselves out. My version of farming is all about healthy soil, healthy bacteria, healthy fungi, healthy roots, and dirt-smeared hands shoving sun-warmed berries into mouths. My children and I harvest potatoes barefoot. I don’t even wash my spinach or lettuce before it becomes a salad.

And if I had my way, there would be no lawn. Or at least a whole lot less.

But it was there when we moved in, and my wife has a love for field sports and open spaces to play, and so I keep my daydreams of chickens and ducks and goats and sheep grazing on that grass tucked safely away in my own head for hammock naps in the summer afternoons.

We have both mowed that lawn this spring. We haven’t changed anything we do. It’s not tremendously overgrown, but our one remaining dog has been out to nap and sniff there. The kids have trampled huge swaths of it with their games and left blankets out over it when they read books in the sunshine. The swingset is still there, still creaking gently as each kid tries to swing higher than his brother. The weeds along the perennial beds in back are a bit crazy, but I’ve kept up with them better than I do most springs.

There is a new addition this year of a lush cover crop in that one bed between the house and the above-ground pool. We’ve grown sunflowers there for the last few years, and this year I’m going to put the pumpkins there for a change. The soil is crap. It needs more organic material. In went the mixture of rye and vetch and field peas very early in the year. I’m pretty sure more than a few frogs have eloped in that patch since it grew to its current height.

Another frog discovered near the patio and lovingly rescued.

So I suppose the only explanation left is that we have not been treating the lawn with copper² to kill the native moss.

While we know the prior homeowner here used plenty of chemicals to control what could and could not grow around the property, it’s impossible to know how long some of those chemicals might persist in the soil and in surrounding plants. Frogs, however, are some of the most delicate species with regard to these salts and metals, and crossing a wasteland of copper would have been a death sentence in those early years.

Yes, I cringe at just how many times my kids were out in that grass barefoot, running and playing like there wasn’t a worry in the world. But I grew up drinking well water in big ag country, and look how great I turned out.

Five years of not spraying that lawn has changed how the surrounding wildlife can interact with us. The frogs are at the back door. I routinely see packs of tiny birds foraging in my berry patches. The groundhog has no fear of us. Rabbits routinely mock my dog from the edge of the patio. Sometimes the duck family from the neighbor’s pool visits us.

Our frogs have a message for us. That now, after all this time, they see safety. And that safety is shared with us. It is safe for them to move freely. It is safe for my children’s bare feet to run wild. It’s safe for my dog to lay in the sunshine. It’s safe to lay in the shade and read a book on a hot day.

If this country stopped spraying its hatred across vast swaths of its states, if we ran barefoot through the grass of Oklahoma and chased fireflies in the corn fields of Ohio and ate ripe fruit from Texas orchards, what new songs would we hear from the quieter ones who are sensitive and need protection from harsh things? What voices are quieted that could weave beautiful dreams for us as they tell their stories in whispers to our half-sleeping minds? What unfathomable art are we missing when we control everything around us with an iron grip, tearing out moss to see only grass? And how long will it take once we stop othering and excluding for those who have been hiding to cross this treacherous country and ask for companionship, for love, for community under a cool, starry sky?

You didn’t think I could write all that great stuff about frogs in my yard without actually saying something about anti-trans legislation in the United States, did you?

Our yards and driveways and schools and governments are not so dissimilar. Is your lawn devoid of frog-song? Is your school district celebrating its trans youth? Is your government honoring the human rights of its people?

And no, you cannot ask this question of the grass. You have to ask the amphibians. If you can find them.

Your trans friend,

Robin

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1. Before that it was farms and pastures between the trees in the 1940s. Before that it was more remote agricultural land predominantly owned by Asian farmers that was taken from them during World War II. Japanese families in particular had their land stolen while they and their families were shipped off to internment camps. Even in places where we feel connected to nature there is a human history we should not ignore.

2. Copper sulfate pentahydrate is a common lawn fungicide, and moss killing sprays and products often contain ammonium sulfate, copper sulfate, ferrous sulfates, pentachlorophenate, zinc chloride, and zinc sulfate.