I was down in Walkabout Studios a short while ago…
[A brief explanation, because now’s the time to do it: the new house came with a finished basement room, partially below grade, that even has an outside door, and I immediately snagged this as my office/studio/lab/workshop/makerspace, because it’s largely sound isolated and has windows for ventilation and because I’m a guy and we go underground. I’d started out calling this, “Deep 13,” but no one was getting the reference and The Girlfriend said she couldn’t remember this anyway, so it’s mostly just the “office” and occasionally “the dungeon.”]
… and heard a faint, repeated noise at the back door. I finally went over there to check, and one of the leaves that got tracked in didn’t quite look like a leaf.
The ‘X’ across the back marks this as a spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer,) which should be expected, really, as they like warm, rainy nights in winter and spring, and it’s been raining like hell today. Not exactly sure how it got in, but I did leave the door cracked this afternoon when I stepped out for a little bit and it might have been then, in which case it’s been in here for hours. Or, since I’ve also found the occasional large wolf spider, there’s another ingress someplace. But it wasn’t going to be escorted back outside before it did brief penance as a model of course.
They have a wide variety of colors, and size-wise, they’re very similar to cricket frogs and chorus frogs, about 20mm in body length, but they’re also perhaps the most numerous, at least in conditions like this and especially this time of year (though I did find a juvenile American toad the other day too, about the same size, which is less than half of adult length for that species.)
And like most amphibians, they pause for short periods before choosing the next direction to leap in, which doesn’t ever seem to involve actually choosing a landing spot, so my photo session demanded recapturing my model twice before I finished up and re-introduced it to the great outdoors. I’ll see if I can snag some audio of their calls – I heard them last night, so maybe it’s still warm enough to get some samples tonight.
Even though we had our entry today, I have to note that this could also serve as a ‘Just Once’ candidate – kind of. I have one previous appearance of what could be a spring peeper, but back then it was going under the old scientific name of Hyla crucifer, so this is the only mention of a Pseudacris crucifer – or is that being too technical? Hey, it’s my blog, I’ll do what I want…