Frog and Toad Survey #1

Last night was a fine night to be out listening for frogs. We had no wind and no moon. The stars were big and bright.  The conditions were just perfect for the loudest wood frog symphony that I have ever heard.  The spring peepers were also calling and the boreal chorus frogs too and that is all well and good. To me the wood frog noise is more special because they call for a shorter span of time than other frogs.  We were out there listening when in the distance a car would start coming toward us. We can hear the tires rolling on the pavement for more than a mile away.  The sound of tires on a road completely covers the sound of the wood frog.  I can hear the spring peepers and the chorus frogs as the car rolls past but not the wood frogs. As soon as the sound of the car is gone the sound of the wood frog rushes back at us and we wonder how we could not hear that! Do wood frogs and tires have the same low frequency? We heard a winnowing snipe. We heard a pair of barred owls calling back and forth at probably half of our ten stops.  We heard a great horned owl too and after that the barred owls quit talking.  We heard a loon call.  We saw a lot of rain in the ditches on the way up there.  The roads weren't too bad until we got to Teal Road - the same spot where we got stuck in a frost boil many years ago.  That road was soft.  Other vehicles left deep tire ruts.  From my low vantage point in my Honda Fit, I tried to avoid the deepest ruts as much as I could by sticking to the left side of the road. There were times where the road scraped the bottom of my car.  There was just no way to avoid all the ruts.  The road conditions made me anxious.  I do not want to get stuck in the swamp in the dark again.  To relieve my anxiety I start making noises like a robot as we traverse the worst spots. "Ooh!  Awk! Eeek! Yike!"  The noises help.  Not being alone out here helps even more. We make it through and I am happy to be on pavement once again.  By that time I wasn't feeling too good.  I knew I had a cold and I tried to time the use of Dayquil so that I would be at my best all evening but I must have gotten that wrong.  By the eighth stop this cold had, in the words of Pat Benatar, hit me with it's best shot.  I was sneezing and coughing and my eyes were watering.  Wow. But even with cold symptoms, being out here in the dark was an amazing experience. In a big hurry to get home, nature forced me to slow down.  As I headed east off Highway 169 towards Nowthen, the sky lit up. Green northern lights shimmered in the sky in crazy patterns.  Half of my brain wanted me to pull over and enjoy this spectacle. But it was midnight and I was ill. The other half wanted me to go home, swallow some Nyquil, and go to bed. Ever the diplomat to my own internal struggles, I drove slow until the forest blocked my view of the northern lights.