I love microhylid frogs. There's just something about their chubby little bodies and pointy noses that I find cute. And then our US species have wonderful, loud sheep-like bleating calls. So I've always wanted to see and here some of the neotropical microhylids but had always come up short in my travels. So I was excited on my Panama trip to get an opportunity to add a new genus of microhylid to my recording list.
The Panamanian Humming Frog (Elachistocleis panamensis) is an odd, pointy-nosed microhylid that occurs from central Panama into the lowlands of Colombia and Venezuela. It is related to our North American Narrow-mouthed Toads (Gastrophryne sp.).
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| range map derived from iNaturalist.org (2024) |
They are generally dark with a brownish-yellow back and an irregular, dark mid-dorsal stripe. The mid-dorsal stripe is split by a thin yellow line from the tip of the pointy nose to the end of the body.
The common name "humming frog" is derived from the calls of other members of this genus in South America whose calls I guess could be considered reminiscent of a humming sound, at least from a distance.
But this northernmost representative of the genus has a completely different type of call. The call of the Panamanian Humming Frog is more of a high-pitched whistled trilling sound. It reminds me somewhat of the high-pitched trill of the Australian Rain Frog (Austrochaperina pluvialis)
I heard these frogs calling from a flooded grassy ditch after some heavy rains in the Tocumen marshes of Central Panama. The call of this species is fairly high pitched for a frog. Because of the high pitch of this trill, I assumed it was an insect until I got home and did some research. (The sharp "chick" calls you hear among the Humming Frog calls are part of the call of the Túngara Frog. I filtered out the descending parts of the call to bring out the Humming Frog.)
You can see in this spectrogram how there are 12 rapid high-pitched (5 kHz) chirps in less than half a second.
So once again, I got a recording lifer by just point my microphone at an interesting sound in a marsh and then doing some research later to find out I had added a new recording lifer to my list! Always a good day when I can do that!
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© Chris Harrison 2024
iNaturalist. https://www.inaturalist.org/ Accessed August 12, 2024
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