Snow lingers in the woods, though a few bare spots have emerged under the firs, where the snow never amounted to much. The ice is mostly gone from the pond, and now, in mid April, we listen carefully for the wood frogs, lovely tan creatures with black masks who find the merest signs of spring reason enough to wake up and go for a swim.

One day I hear a couple of frogs and then a day or two later, I hear hundreds of them, their low key quacking easily mistaken for ducks. If any other frogs are about, it’s only a few spring peepers that pierce the wood frogs’ soft symphony.

The males are the first to reach the pond. Some command a foot or so of shoreline, hoping a female will hop down the hillside; others spread out across one of the coves, spacing themselves about a yard apart, hoping to intercept the females who must swim across from the opposite shore.

When a female arrives, males will try to climb on her back and then grasp her very tightly around her neck, gaining a position that will allow them to fertilize the eggs when they are eventually deposited, a process known as “amplexis.” Since two or more males will, if they can, glom onto a single female, it is essential the females be much larger than the males so they can pop up for a breath of air whenever they want to.

One year the frogs arrived on a Sunday, April 19. I found a spot near the shore where I could see five dozen frogs without even moving my head. While sitting there, I would hear rustling behind me and then watch crazed males take wild leaps into the pond. While any quick movement would cause all the males to submerge, an extremely loud sneeze had no effect!

Finally, a female appeared. Redder and larger than the males, she swam up under some grass clippings and stuck her nose up, the grass hanging over her forehead, making her seem like a teenager who’d dyed her hair to upset her parents. She eventually moved to within an inch of the shoreline. After a while, she set out for the nearest male, who was just hanging in the water four feet away. But she quickly veered off and swam within a couple of inches of the next male, then sped past. This guy quickly caught up, jumped on, and grabbed her around the neck.

Another female made passes at three males. Each time she approached and stopped, allowing the male to swim by for her inspection. The first two times, she apparently didn’t like what she saw and swam away. The third time, she swam past the male, paused, and allowed the male to mount. A would be suitor contested the pairing, but the first male held on tightly enough and the pair swam off.

The wood frogs continued most of that Sunday, taking a break for a couple of hours during the middle of the afternoon, then continuing until at least 9 pm. On Monday morning, there were only a few dozen frogs left in the pond, but there were more than 325 clumps of eggs in the reeds, each with two hundred or so eggs well over 50,000 eggs!

It was a lovely 65 degree day, the first real day of spring, when I next went out to check on the wood frog eggs. Numerous migrating birds had arrived overnight, including a small flock of evening grosbeaks, a phoebe, a flicker, a pair of wood ducks and three mergansers. Two ruby crowned kinglets, faster even than warblers, flitted about in the willows and the brush, while a song sparrow serenaded a pair of tree swallows that were checking out a bird house by the pond.

The wood frogs were gone, but their egg masses attracted a lot of notice. Nine newts squirmed in, around and through the jumble of egg clumps, sometimes twisting around each other and at other times plunging solo through the gooey masses. Several huge leeches attached to the clumps of eggs, and a painted turtle swam by, checking out the whole operation.

Within five or six days, about half of the tadpoles were out or active within their sacs; within a week, all had emerged; within another day or two, the egg cases themselves were mostly gone. I couldn’t tell who was eating them, it could have been ducks, newts, other frogs, the muskrat I noted hiding in the reeds or perhaps they just dissolve.

It may or may not be coincidence that ducks and a magnificent pair of great blue herons began to visit our little pond just after the wood frogs arrived. They were certainly enjoying their feeding, though I never could see what they were capturing.

From time to time over the next several weeks, I would see a vast swarm of tadpoles a yard wide, a foot deep, and more than 50 feet long, moving slowly along the edge of the pond, feeding on minute bits of vegetation and detritus and generally cleaning up the grasses and sedges at the edge of the pond. What a marvelous example of the incredible explosion of life in the pond!

Carl D. Martland, Coverts Cooperator