Blue-sided Leaf Frog
Agalychnis annae

Blue-sided Leaf Frog (Agalychnis annae)
San Jose, Costa Rica

The Blue-sided Leaf Frog (Agalychnis annae) was the last new species I recorded in Costa Rica.  That's because I recorded it in the grounds of the hotel we were staying at in San Jose the night before we flew home.   The embarrassing thing was that the beautiful grounds of our hotel (Hotel Bougainvillia) had a couple of small ponds and one of the ponds had a sign talking about the "Golden-eyed Treefrog".  I figured it was a translation problem and they really were talking about the common and widespread Red-eyed Treefrog (A. callidryas).  

On our last day in San Jose, as we walked around the grounds taking photos, I looked at the sign again and realized they were talking about a different species altogether, Agalychnis annae!  As we ate dinner I looked over my Costa Rican amphibian book and was shocked to discover that not only was A. annae a different species than I had originally thought, but it was almost extinct across much of its range and there were a few remnant pockets of this species found in gardens and parks in the sprawling, polluted, overcrowded metropolis of San Jose!

Blue-sided Leaf Frog range map from IUCN Redlist

So my plans for that evening were originally just to get photos of the Peralta Frogs (Lithobates taylori) that lived in these garden pools, but now I had a new and much more exciting target....if only they would call!

Turns out they did call that night even though it hadn't rained that day.   We were able to find a number of these big green frogs hiding amongst the rushes and reeds surrounding the ponds.   They were quite shy, preferring to cling to the stems of the reeds/rushes rather than sitting up openly on top of leaves like the other Agalychnis species I had encountered.

The call of this frog is best described as a quiet "croak" or "puck" sound.   They were only calling very intermittently as heard in this recording. This frog only calls four times in the two minutes of this recording.  It calls at 4 seconds, 25 seconds, 66 seconds and 104 seconds in.  It takes a fair bit of patience to capture anything at all.   I assume they would call more aggressively during rains?

Here's another recording made of a different individual where the calls are a bit more frequent.


Blue-sided Leaf Frog calls

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© Chris Harrison 2025

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