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| Daly Waters Frog (Ranoidea maculosa); photo used by Creative Commons License granted by iNaturalist user Ralph Foster (rfoster) from this record |
The Daly Waters Frog (Ranoidea maculosa) is a medium-sized rotund little "Cyclorana" style frog from the Northern Territory of Australia. It is named for the town of Daly Waters, roughly halfway between Darwin and Alice Springs. The town itself is famous for its outback pub and being the site of a tree that may have been monogrammed with a large carved S by the explorer John McDouall Stuart in 1862. However, the veracity of this claim is questioned.
But when I was planning my trip to the Northern Territory and looked in my Australia Frog book, I saw that there was a frog species that the book indicated only lived in that area! Obviously my curiosity was piqued, and I started hatching a plan to make a side trip down to Daly Waters to add this species to my frog recording list.
It turned out I didn't make it to Daly Waters, but also that the Daly Waters Frog has a range well beyond the boundaries of this tiny outback town. I recorded my maculosa 300 miles west of Daly Waters in Kununarra, Western Australia.
The call of this frog is a bit hard to describe. It is a long groaning "waaiiii" that lasts around 2 seconds. In fact, when I first heard this frog calling it was in a very loud chorus of other species, but it was the length of the call that made it stand out from the shorter, louder calls of the other species.
I captured this call of the Daly Waters Frog quite by accident in this deafening frog chorus north of Kununurra after the first real heavy rainfall at the beginning of the "wet"1 season.
I heard the longer call that night in this flooded roadside grassy ditch next to a farm, but the chorus of other species was so deafening, I couldn't really pin down where the R. maculosa was calling from.
Here's a short sample of the cacophony of this roadside puddle. The noisiest contributors are the Giant Frog (Ranoidea australis), the Desert Treefrog (Litoria rubella) and the laugh of the Western Laughing Treefrog (Litoria ridibunda). See if you can pick out the long, two second "groans" of the Daly Waters Frog in there.
Obviously, you can't hear the long "waiiih" call of the Daly Waters Frog very clearly in that recording, but I have applied some heavy EQ and filtering to try and bring out the long "waaaiiiih" in this recording.
highly filtered sound of the Daly Waters Frog
For a comparison recording, listen to the recording by Nathan Litjens on this Australian Museum Frog Identification Page
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© Chris Harrison 2023
1. Even in the wettest season, there is nothing particularly "wet" about this part of arid Australia at the edge of the Kimberleys region.
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