The place was still as I recalled it in dreams of 35 years ago -- dark and dank, hot and fetid, scummed with algae, swarmed with biting insects, tangled with greenbriar and poison ivy.
Almost perfect.
But too quiet. Where were the shrilling tree frogs, the guttural trilling leopard frogs, the banjo twangs of the green frogs; and most of all, where was the sonorous, basso profundo chuggurrummm of the bullfrogs?
I heard a few notes, but there should have been a whole orchestra. The scene had remained the quintessence of an Eastern Shore freshwater swamp, but the spirit had gone out of the place.
That was the summer of 1993, when I first revisited some of the frog ponds of my youth. I'd been reading and hearing for a few years of a mysterious, growing worldwide decline in populations of frogs, toadsand salamanders.
From golden toads in Costa Rica and red legged frogs in 'D California, to Australian gastric brooding frogs and bullfrogs in 00 eastern Ontario, the scientific reports of amphibian problems were piling up.
Of course, the first cause one would suspect was nothing more exotic than plain old loss of habitat -- draining wetlands, spraying pesticides, cutting forests. I had recently come across some fascinating recollections of the Eastern Shore more than half a century ago by Roger Conant, a world-renowned expert on reptiles and amphibians who made collecting sorties down the Delmarva Peninsula in the 1930s:
"On rainy spring nights many of the frog choruses were so enormous and deafening that one species could not be distinguished from another by ear. Sometimes there were so many frogs and/or toads migrating across the paved roads to nearby breeding ponds and swales that we had to stop the car and shoo them out of the way."
Then, on a return to his old stomping grounds in 1975, Mr. Conant wrote:
"The trip . . . was disheartening; [so many] depressed acres that quickly filled with water and attracted earsplitting choruses had been drained or filled to make room for more crops . . . the Peninsula seemed as though it were wall-to-wall fields, to say nothing of the vast chicken farms."
But something scarier seemed at work in the current, global downturns, scientists were saying; because many of the problems are occurring in remote, still-pristine habitats.
No one yet has nailed down the causes. A prime suspect is increased ultraviolet radiation from a thinning of the earth's ozone layer (caused, apparently, by our release of certain ozone-destroying chemicals).
Or it may be an amphibian-killing fungal disease that seems to be spreading around the world. The final answer may include both, and perhaps other human-induced diseases of the atmosphere, like acid rain.
At any rate, the possible connections between the respective states of the heavens and my old backyard were unsettling. Frogs were a memorable part of my growing up on the Shore. Not that I was a naturalist in those days.
Times were slower then, and on spring and summer nights, we sought simple diversions -- like roaring around the county dump on the hood of a car, shotgunning rats; and setting out long after dark, burlap feed sacks in hand, into the region's abundant swamps and gravel pits to capture bullfrogs. Their long, muscular legs, when skinned and fried, made tasty eating and occasionally fetched a good price from local restaurants.
When I was a little older, I was privileged to be invited frogging, with a group of slightly over-the-hill Shoremen who billed themselves as the All-American Team. They came from half a dozen little towns you never stopped in on your way to Ocean City. By day they were businessmen, pharmacists and bureaucrats, caught up in all the normal stresses of life. But on warm spring and summer evenings, in the small ponds that are the province of the dedicated bullfrogger, they were very big fish indeed.
Sometimes the All-Americans and their invitees drank too much, which could lead to poor form, like losing one's hip boots in the muck; or even bad behavior, like dispatching the night's catch by biting their heads off, instead of the time-honored whack-'em-against-the-nearest-hard-object method.
But mostly, they were true professionals and aficionados, who ,, taught me to disdain crass methods of capture such as shooting with a small caliber rifle, or gigging the frogs with a trident on the end of a pole.
Purists in technique
We embraced the purist technique, bare-handed, mano a froggo. Wading as deep as your chest in the swamp, transfixing a pair of glowing eyes in your flashlight beam, you would stalk, ever so delicately to within arm's reach. Then, leaning, slowly, sloooowly toward the frog, light still steady on its face, bring your free hand around behind its slithery body and GRAB! squeezing it firmly before chucking in the sack at your waist. Some nights, when they were clicking, the All-Americans would secure well over a hundred bullfrogs that way.
They took their frogging seriously, but at heart it was just fun -- an excuse to explore hidden spots, to stomp around in the dark and get wet and muddy and all scratched up.
Of course, you can do that without frogs, but somehow, they were the catalysts, the resonant, booming spirits of the soggy, hidden pockets of the land.
So it was that this summer, concerned about the loss of such a legacy, also looking for an excuse to stomp around in the dark and get wet and muddy and all scratched up, I set about trying to ascertain the state of the bullfrog in Maryland.
From the start, I was nearly certain that no one would know for sure. State biologists have just begun a modest survey, cursorily monitoring frog populations by listening to their mating calls at selected locations around Maryland each spring; but even assuming the survey is continued, it will be years before any trends are apparent.
We tend to collect data most about the wildlife we value. And "value" usually is interpreted narrowly, to mean commercial importance, like the oyster and blue crab; or major game creatures like white-tailed deer and largemouth bass; or, in a few cases, animals that are charismatic and scarce, like the bald eagle.
Ask any biologist. There is seldom much money available for the study and monitoring of populations of frogs and salamanders, though it is arguable that these amphibians, many of them highly sensitive to pollutants in air and water, are better indicators of the health of our natural ecosystems than crabs or deer.
If we are ignorant of its population status, we know the bullfrog well as an individual organism. It is our country's largest frog, its head and body reaching 8 inches in length, weighing nearly a pound and living more than a decade. It is an opportunist, eating whatever it can fit in its gaping mouth, ranging from Maine and Minnesota to the mouth of the Pecos river.
Its formal name, Rana catesbeiana, comes from Mark Catesby, the famous early American naturalist who, in the 1730s, described its namesake sound: ". . . from a quarter of a mile off, their bellowing sounds very much like that of a bull."
As early as 1897, legs from the bullfrog were fetching up to $4 a dozen in seafood markets, according to federal fisheries data from the period.
"My gut feeling is that, yes, there are declines among the frog populations in Maryland -- but nothing that we can document at this time," says Arnold Norden, a biologist with the state and editor of the journal The Maryland Naturalist.
Mr. Norden put me on the mailing list of FROGLOG, an intriguing international newsletter, dedicated to reports of amphibian problems around the world.
Supported financially in part by Frog's Leap Winery in St. Helena, Calif., the "log" keeps abreast of everything from trends in Wyoming toads to exports of green frogs from Romania.
Local, not global causes
The only study I could find in it of bullfrog decline -- in Eastern Ontario -- implicated local pesticides, loss of wetlands, and commercial over-harvesting, rather than global causes.
Indeed, harvest pressure may be more of a factor in determining bullfrog abundance than anyone realizes, at least in parts of Maryland.
One of the first places I checked, in addition to amphibian scientists, was Wick Lowe's little seafood market on the Nanticoke River in Sharptown. Whatever edible is crawling or swimming in the swamps and creeks of the region, Wick either has it, or he can get it.
Frog legs? You bet, he said when I called. He had "the imported," from Australia or Brazil; or if I wanted local, he would call his son, Bill, to go out and catch some. It would be $7-$10 a pound either way.
LTC Were local harder to get nowadays, I wanted to know? Well, he could get them, Mr. Lowe said, but suggested I check with his son, whom I immediately liked when I found he, too, prefers the barehanded method of capture.
"Froggin's not been good at all the last few years," says Bill Lowe, 42, who in real life is a carpenter. He had a frogging place up the Marshy Hope Creek, a branch of the Nanticoke "that was prime," he says. It was a series of old gravel pits, cut off from the river and now forested over again.
Such places provide ideal conditions for frogs, and also are relatively free from the fish that eat amphibian eggs and larvae in more open waters. From his description, it sounded like a spot where 20 years ago I got more than 100 bullfrogs in several hours with the All-American team.
"But it was just about wiped out by people who don't understand how to treat a froggin' pond," Bill Lowe says. The trouble began when Kool Ice, a bustling seafood wholesale and retail market in Cambridge, began paying up to $1.50 a frog, "and for that, there's guys around here that'll frog midnight to daylight, five night's a week -- you can't frog a place that heavy and expect it to last."
From a few other spots, I got similar reports of heavy frogging pressure. A manager at Kool Ice confirmed that his company buys bullfrogs for a dollar or more apiece. They sell them live, which saves the trouble and expense of skinning and cleaning them. Where do they sell them? He didn't want to give away any secrets, but indicated it was to "Asian ethnic groups," apparently in the New York area. He said (correctly it turns out) there is no legal limit on the number of bullfrogs that may be caught in Maryland.
Another frog informant, J. C. Tolley, heard of my quest and called to tell of old-timers in his area -- lower Dorchester County -- saying a decline in frogs has happened since the state began spraying regularly several years ago for mosquitoes.
He knows the spray people deny anything is affected but mosquito larvae, Mr. Tolley says, "but you know, spraying kills bugs, and frogs eat bugs . . . it makes sense to me."
But a cleaner bill of health came from Don Forester, a professor at Towson State University. He has a lifelong interest in amphibians, and has surveyed their habitat throughout Maryland. The last four digits of his home phone, I noticed, spell FROG.
Not much problem
"I don't see any overall problem," he says. "Bullfrogs, if anything, may be expanding . . . they are generalists and can live almost anywhere that's wet." They are even spreading to many of the storm water and sediment-management ponds that environmental laws are requiring to be built all over Maryland, he says.
A second to that came from Charlie Stine, a Johns Hopkins ecologist, longtime environmental educator and amphibian expert. He feels that even the global decline, if it is occurring, may be "very species specific." He doesn't think the bullfrog is among the species in trouble. "I've been keeping field notes on my expeditions to the Shore for 40 years, and I don't note a disappearance," he says.
Bruce Nichols, a farmer and biologist with the USDA Soil Conservation Service on the Shore, says he would be happy if I could help him cause a bullfrog decline on his farm near Wicomico County's Rewastico Creek. He has dug ponds there in which he hopes to aquaculture crawfish; except bullfrogs eat the young of the species.
"I have tried to trap the bullfrogs out, but it is hard to keep up with them," Mr. Nichols says. I was welcome to get wet and muddy and all scratched up at his place anytime, he adds.
Who could pass up such an invitation? It would have been nothing less than a breach of etiquette. I tried to interest some of the old All-American team. One complained of arthritis; another said he just might show, but you knew by his voice he wouldn't. Yet another was described as "too big to bend over and grab 'em up anymore."
I was able, finally, to assemble a younger crew, thanks to some adventurous field educators with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. A glorious night of thrashing about ensued, though with scant damage to the frog population. They learned it is easier said than done, this grabbing frogs by hand; and I learned something too -- like many old hunters, it's not the body counts that seem to matter anymore.
The thrill these days lies more in the listening for the night songs, and in the pre-hunt scouting of the ditches and ponds and gravel pits and country dirt roads; in aligning oneself with the landscape from the standpoint of an alien creature.
Exploring hidden spots
I never really answered the question of the health of frogs across Maryland -- never really expected to do more than illuminate a few corners. I just love to get out and explore hidden spots, and stomp around in the dark and get wet and muddy and all scratched up; and I met a lot of other people, from Ph.D's to carpenters, who seem to like that, too.
There is an answer. It lies in putting more resources into efforts like a little paper Arnold Norden sent me. Prefaced as "A six-year study of the herpetofauna of Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary," it will never have much of a popular audience.
It is a classic of painstaking observation, trapping, weighing, measuring and cataloging of 39 species of snake, frog, toad, salamander, lizard and turtle. More than 200 volunteers helped the two biologists who did it. Only from studies like this, spread across the state and repeated periodically, can we acquire the baseline data needed to really detect changes over time, to sort out natural ups and downs, and differentiate local problems from universal ones.
Something else. Though I don't know Shannon Smithberger and Christopher Swarth, the report's principal investigators, don't you imagine they like to stomp around in the dark and get wet and muddy and all scratched up?