When I'm out traveling looking for birds and herps, I often stumble across an unusual sound I don't recognize and I will record it to try and figure out if it was a new frog or something else.
Such was the case with this frog. I saw this tiny treefrog I saw sitting on a leaf one night while on a night walk at the Asa Wright Nature Center. I couldn't get any closer because it was on a leaf below me on a steep hillside off the road. So I grabbed the only shot I could. At the time, I figured it was one of the small treefrog species from Trinidad but they are tough to ID. So I decided to ID it later after some research. I came up with a tentative ID of the Lesser Treefrog (Dendropsophus minutus).
After I posted it on iNaturalist, a local Trinidad herper corrected my ID to Mount Tucuche Tree Frog (Flectnonotus fitzgeraldi). I was delighted to be corrected not just to have the right ID, but the fact that this was one of the Marsupial frogs in a totally new family for me - the Hemiphractidae!
So a few months later, I happened to be deleting some older recordings I had made with my phone and I ran across some forgotten recordings I had made in Trinidad. I normally don't record "important" recordings with my phone but I will grab a quick recording if I don't have my other gear. Among the recordings on my phone was this call.....
This recording included a series of buzzy clicks in patterns of two or three. At the time I wasn't positive it was a frog, but it sounded too erratic to be a cricket or other orthopteran (they usually have long or consistently repetitive calls). A few days ago, I happened to listen to a recording of a different Flectonotus species online (F. pygmaeus) and that made me think of this recording.
Hmm, I wonder if F. fitzgeraldi sounds similar. There were no recordings available online, but I found this paper from about the differences between the species. The paper describes F. fitzgeraldi as having a call similar to F. pygmaeus but instead of single pulses the calls of F. fitzgeraldi are in groups of two or three. That's exactly what this recording shows and I am pretty confident that the frog in my recording is Flectonotus fitzgeraldi!
___________________
© Chris Harrison 2019
Sinsch, Ulrich and Juraske, Norbert. 2006. Advertisement calls of hemiphractine marsupial frogs: III. Flectonotus spp. in M. Vences, J. Köhler, T. Ziegler, W. Böhme (eds): Herpetologia Bonnensis II. Proceedings of the 13th Congress of the Societas Europaea Herpetologica. pp. 153-157 (2006)
