STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

More Down Yonder

• Down Yonder: Hardwood to figure out
• Down Yonder: It didn’t take a brave man, after all
• Down Yonder: Floridians remember the family

Share and Enjoy [?]

I’m wet! Oh yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “He’s always been all wet.” But I mean, I’m really wet, soppin’, soakin’, sodden, saturated, permeated, drenched, drippin’ wet.

The squirrels are water-skiing in my backyard and the mockingbirds are learning how to scuba dive. I mean it’s been raining’, brothers and sisters, almost eight or 10 inches at a time.

But while we humans are beginnin’ to get moldy and tired of it, the tree frogs are havin’ one big party. Tree frogs love the rain, you see, because that’s when they mate – assuming they like to mate, which is a relatively easy assumption to make.

That’s right. While it might take a beer or two before some species to get the urge to mate, the tree frogs don’t get the urge until it rains and only then in the wee hours of morning before dawn.

No doubt you’ve heard them mating – and mating loudly on just about any night this week. That’s what they’re doin’ long about 4 a.m. when they wake you up with their loud chatterin.’ They’re matin’ out back in the bog or gettin’ ready to.

You see, that’s why tree frogs bark in the rain like they do. They’re calling for a partner with which to … um … well, you know … froggy feel good.

Although this next fact is lost on me, I’m told that if you listen closely enough and long enough you can begin to identify each individual frog’s distinct bark. It’s the male frogs that do the barkin’ and a distinctive call is how their mates identify them.

Peaches and Herb got nothin’ on these guys.

What’s even more amazin’ is that the frogs don’t even have to open their mouth to bark and they don’t actually have intercourse to breed.

They bark, I’m told, by shunting air back and forth between their little froggy lungs and their little froggy vocal sac, which is an inflatable membrane beneath their little froggy throats. The noise comes about when the air passes over their vocal chords and resonates in the inflatable sac to the point that it wakes me up.

To actually breed, the female lays her eggs over which the male pours his semen while he holds her from behind. But enough about that.

They like to perform this remarkable feat in what golfers call “casual water” because it’s a relatively safe haven from predators such as fish, salamanders and water snakes.

There are lots of different types of tree frogs around these parts. There’s the green tree frog and the squirrel tree frog and the gray tree frog and the pine woods tree frog and, of course, the southern spring peeper. But the most common type of tree frog you’re likely to hear is the Cuban tree frog, which is not even a native.

The Cuban tree frog was intentionally introduced to southern Dade County in the early 1960s, which has nothing to do with Fidel and U.S. foreign policy. The Cuban tree frog decided it liked mating in South Florida’s casual water and spread like wildfire, which is also why we keep havin’ folks pushin’ for an English-only tree frog amendment to the Florida Constitution.

But I say let ’em be.

We ought to feel sorry for any species that only mates in flooded ditches in the wee hours of morning when it rains – without actual intercourse.

---

Steve Hart is a sailor, angler, explorer, raconteur, amateur citrus-grower and semi-professional theologian who masqueraded as a Florida journalist and pundit for the last 25 years. A fifth-generation Floridian, Hart comes from solid cracker stock but revels in the changing face of 21st century Florida and its patchwork quilt of people, their cultures, traditions, shades and ideas. His book, “Tales from Down Yonder, Florida,” is available in local bookstores and on the Web at www.downyonderflorida.com.