This Week’s Creature Feature: Cricket Frog Joins a Chorus
February and March bring in the early sounds of spring. With each brief warm period, a chorus of frogs will declare it is time for the winter world to wake up. One of those little hibernating amphibians is the cricket frog.
Cricket frogs are only about one and a quarter inch long. They live in and around ponds, lakes, slow-moving streams and permanent puddles where their food — mosquitoes and midges — is easy to find. There they in turn become food for many animals that hunt along the water’s edge: raccoons, egrets, garter snakes and bass.
Their name comes because their call sounds like a cricket … or a Geiger counter … or small stones clicking together.
Cricket frog song varies in speed and volume as it mixes in the evening with the spring peepers. You can hear them day and night.
I found this one in a small cypress bog along Towser’s Branch in Waugh Chapel.