I recorded this Whistling Frog (Eleutherodactylus johnstonei) calling on the grounds of the Hotel Floris in Curaçao, Netherland Antilles. You can hear this Whistling Frog call then another, more distant frog answers.
Here is a section from the sonogram taken from Audacity. In this sonogram section, only a single call from this frog is seen.
I do enjoy the sound of frog calls, obviously. However there are some species whose calls I find so piercing or loud that I find them difficult to listen to a big chorus. This is one such species. As I wandered around the grounds of our hotel in Curaçao trying to get a clean recording and a photo I thought how maddening it must be to have this species calling outside of your window night after night!
Blanchard's Cricket Frog is one of the more common species in our area of Central Texas. They are found almost anywhere there is permanent water. Their clicks are one of the typical sounds of a central Texas summer night.. The taxonomy of this frog is currently under review. It has been known as Acris crepitans, Acris blanchardi, and Acris crepitans blanchardi. Cricket Frogs are very small frogs. Adults are usually less than 1 inch in length.
Blanchard's Cricket Frog (Acris blanchardi)
Refugio County, Texas
These frogs have a large vocal sac that extends from the front of their thoat.
Blanchard'sCricket Frog (Acris blanchardi)
Real County, Texas
If their breeding calls are successful, they produce small brownish tadpoles.
Blanchard'sCricket Frog (Acris blanchardi) tadpoles
Real County, Texas
The call is a sharp clicking, sounding very much like two small stones or marbles being clicked together. It generally starts slow and increases in speed as the frog gets "into" the calling process. Here is a single individual from Atascosa County.
In the spectrogram for the preceding call, you can see the single, sharp clicks increasing in frequency as the frog gets going.
call of the Blanchard's Cricket Frog (Acris blanchardi)
In the following short recording, you can hear a large group of Cricket Frogs calling from a flooded quarry in Fayette County, Texas.
In the spectrogram for this recording, the individual clicks become much harder to distinguish.
call of the Blanchard's Cricket Frog (Acris blanchardi)
Here is a Blanchard's Cricket Frog calling from a creek edge in La Salle County, Texas.
The Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor) is a common treefrog of wooded areas in the eastern half of North America. As the common name implies, it is a "gray" frog and is usually found in wooded areas often low in trees and bushes.
Although it is called the "gray" treefrog, its color varies from light whitish gray to dark gray or from brownish gray, tan or even bright green. It usually has a pattern of markings on its skin to give it a pattern that helps it blend in to the bark of trees. Again the pattern can be gray on gray, gray on whitish, gray on green, brown on tan or brown on green. A few individuals show so little pattern that they appear almost uniform light whitish gray or solid green backed. They usually have some yellow on the hind limbs that helps you identify these patternless frogs.
Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor)
Grimes County, Texas
Although the species is quite common across much of its range, the actual range of the species is hard to delineate because there is an identical species of gray treefrog, Cope's Gray Treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis) that overlaps over much of the range. While the two species differ in the number of chromosomes and their calls, they are indistinguishable in external appearance. Because of this, the range of the two species has been intertwined. Most field guides tend to make a combined range map for "Gray Treefrog (H. versicolor and H. chrysoscelis)" to get around this problem. In recent years, efforts have been made to help define the range and overlap of these two species with more precision.
Fortunately, when they are calling the two species are pretty easy to distinguish. Cope's Gray Treefrog (H. chrysoscelis) has a dry rattling trill while the Gray Treefrog (H. versicolor) has a slower, more bird-like trill. I have several blog entries for Hyla chrysoscelis and Hyla versicolor that compare the two species.
Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor)
Houston County, Texas
Here is a cleaned up version of three calls from an Gray Treefrog from Colorado County, Texas. The call was "cleaned" to remove some of the other species calling in the same pond.
Here is the spectrogram from that recording. The white marks represent the treefrog's call.
Here is another recording of a Gray Treefrog (H. versicolor) from Colorado County, Texas. Great Plains Narrow-mouthed Toads (Gastrophryne olivacea) can be heard in the background.
Here's a short video showing two individual Gray Treefrogs calling the Davy Crockett National Forest near Lufkin, Texas.
The Western Narrow-mouthed Toad (Gastrophryne olivacea) is a common resident of central and southern Texas but is generally overlooked by most people. This is because it is usually found underground or under rocks and other surface cover. It only comes to the surface to breed after heavy rains. This group of anurans is a clear example of the problem of using common names to categorize animals. The old rule every elementary school child was taught was that "frogs have smooth skin, toads have dry skin" or that "frogs live near the water, toads live further away". Unfortunately, those rules only work for two of the almost 50 Anuran families that are currently recognized. In this case, we have a a family of smooth skinned animals that live away from the water yet some of the members of this family are known as frogs (Sheep Frog) and others are known as toads (Narrow-mouthed Toads).
Narrow-mouthed Toads have a conspicuous fold of skin just behind the eyes and a short, pointy head and fat body. The underside of this species is uniform white or gray, which distinguishes it from its eastern cousin, the Eastern Narrow-mouthed Toad (G. carolinensis). The Eastern species has a black and white mottled belly.
Narrow-mouthed Toads are small frogs. Females reach approximately 1.5 inches while males are even smaller. Males also have a black throat.
Narrow-mouthed Toads tend to call from flooded grassy fields and ditches after heavy rains. The frog shown above was calling from a shallow puddle of water in a flooded lawn in Comal County, Texas. They usually call either floating with their legs extended or standing upright among grassy pond edges as seen here. Their vocal sac is quite large for such a small frog.
Their call is a surprisingly loud, nasal, bleating "waaaaaahhh". It is one of the conspicuous sounds in southern Texas after heavy rains. Here is the recording of the individual in the photo -
Here is the spectrogram from a single call from that frog. You can see that there is a increase in pitch at the beginning followed by the long, wide band bleat.
Large choruses of these little frogs can make a constant buzzing sound. Here's a large chorus from La Salle County, Texas.
Individual calls can be distinguished by the slight upward whistled slur that the frogs make in while in large choruses. This large chorus in La Salle County, Texas shows that pattern.
Here's a short section of that chorus:
and the spectrogram for that section. The sold dark area around 4-5 KHz is the buzzy nasal whine of the Narrowmouthed Toads. The highlighted upward slurs represent where a individual frog starts a new call. You only see/hear this in large choruses of these frogs.
