The Orange-thighed Treefrog (Chlorohyla xanthomera) is a beautiful medium-sized treefrog restricted to the tropical rainforest areas of Northeastern Queensland.
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| Orange-thighed Treefrog range map derived from the Australian Frog Atlas under Creative Commons License |
When I found out I would be traveling to NE QLD, this was one of the species I had most wanted to see in this area. I was delighted to finally get a chance to photograph the one above on my last night in the area. However, I was disappointed that I didn't have the chance to record them since I hadn't come across any calling....or so I thought. When I listened to my recordings of unknown frog calls from a few days prior and realized one of my "mystery frogs" was this species!
Once again, repeating a pattern I observed several times in Australia, the prettier the treefrog, the more raucous its call seemed to be! The call of the Orange-thighed Treefrog is a loud nasal "waaaah, waaaah, waaaahh" sometimes interspersed with a dry growl/trill.
In this spectrogram, you see the end of the following recording where the loud ascending "waaah" calls give way to a series of trills (visible at the very end of this spectrogram only).
In this longer recording you will hear a series of the "waaaah" calls that lead into the dry "growl/trill" sound at the end. This was recorded from beside the road in the rainforest in the mountains just west of Mossman, Queensland. At the time, I wasn't aware which species of frog these were.
Chlorohyla xanthomera calls
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© Chris Harrison 2015
This species was moved from the genus Ranoidea and Litoria into the genus Chlorohyla in 2025. I am working on updating all my blog entries.
