They say we solve our problems in our dreams. Maybe it’s so. Most of my dreams are boring and incomprehensible on any level. They mostly recycle the last things I spent time looking at on a screen.
Maybe my dreams feature certain recurring Mahjong tiles that have been burned into my brain’s retinas just before I went to bed. Don’t argue: my brain has retinas. Maybe my dreams feature the bird feeder from the game Wingspan and all night long I’m looking for ONE MORE RAT FOR MY FALCON and all the feeder will give me is fish and wheat. Maybe my dreams feature a jumble of letters and I’m supposed to make something of them that isn’t even there. My dreams are not satisfying.
Maybe that’s because the problem they should be solving is that I’m spending way too much time staring at screens. They never solve that. Is there joy in what I’m doing online, or am I just speeding forward into oblivion and shoving time under my wheels?
I need a break, not from reality, but toward reality. The other night I got one. Frog Season was starting. Our Frog Team scoops frogs off the road before they get squished on Highway 30. The frogs are headed downhill from Forest Park to their breeding pond near the river, the way they’ve evolved to do, and Highway 30 is massively in the way. So we volunteers intercept them and put them in buckets and drive them across the highway. We’ve been doing this for years now. The breeding season for our northern red-legged frogs lasts from December into, sometimes, mid-April. This is not your pansy-ass spotted salamander migration that occurs over maybe three rainy nights in March. Our frogs are ready to roll for months. So we are too.
I don’t have to be ready for them every night. I’m on the Monday night team, and the frogs are guaranteed not to show up if it’s still light out, or below 44 degrees, or dry. Or, for me, not Monday.
Monday, December 8th, though, it was going to be close to sixty degrees and raining like hell. We monitor the roads in December just in case, but historically, we haven’t gotten many frogs then. Still, our Captain Jane thought the conditions were promising enough we should make an appearance.
Well, that’s why she’s Captain. Would there be frogs? Oh, there were frogs. We intercepted 135. And 44 of those were gravid females. It was unprecedented, for December, that many frogs. And females usually trail males down the hill by several weeks. But hell, it’s also not supposed to be sixty degrees in December. We haven’t gotten any cold temperatures yet. The ski season on Mt. Hood is weeks away, and should have been rolling by Thanksgiving.
It is best, when immersing yourself in the incomparable joy of amphibian life, to not think too much about the climate we’ve disrupted so thoroughly and quickly.
No. It’s better to enjoy the blessed rain, and the dark, and the matters at hand. Sometimes we see the frogs hopping toward the highway, or we collect them off the landscape cloth we set up to slow them down. But most of the time, I scan the berm on the side of the road with my headlamp. It’s raining, so the rain beading up on the grasses shows up bright. It’s a sea of tiny bright spheres. I’m looking for two such spheres that are ever so slightly yellower, and close together. And then, even from a distance, I know I’ve got a frog.
It is very similar indeed to an online game.
“Come here, honey,” I coo, walking toward the eyeshine. “I’ll give you a lift.” My soothing tone is for my own amusement. My little rubbery friends do not appreciate the sentiment at all. They are on the way to the big party, and they are not interested in being snatched up and dropped in a bucket. They have no concept of the likelihood they might end up a frog-shaped postage stamp on Highway 30. I don’t take it personally. I have a bucket of pissed-off frogs but that’s better than no frogs at all, any day of the week.
The males are considerably smaller than the females, and way feistier and harder to catch. Them is motivated. The females bloop on downhill with their egg cargo and pause. If you’re quiet enough, you might almost hear one saying “You go on ahead, Gladys, I think I’ll catch the 10:45 bucket.”
Monday night I had the rare pleasure of hearing a red-legged frog voice complaint. Mostly, unlike a lot of frogs, they don’t make a sound at all, unless they’re pissed off. Jane and I concluded the sounds of disenchantment were coming from the lone female in the bucket with all the yippety young males. We didn’t blame her a bit.
When I drove home, I wondered why I felt so tired. There was nothing aerobic about this. I was just bending down now and then and scooping frogs.
But it was four and a half hours of it, and it was now one in the morning.
That night I slept well. And all night long, I saw little slightly-yellow spheres in my dreams, paired up, shining in the dark. One after the other. Over and over. In the beautiful rain, in a beautiful urban forest, in the real world we so often ignore.
That night, some problem got solved.
My dreams are mostly about being in a post apocalyptic hell. I often feel I’m in that hell now, but without the cleansing, leveling fire of the apocalypse.
I’m still employed at the job that was supplying adequate finances a year ago, but now wondering how to pay my electric bill or if I’ll have health insurance next year.
I wonder if your red legged frogs are related to our wood frogs. The wood frogs are also winter breeders, but not as early as your red legs. I assisted in surveys for several years. We used drift fences to funnel the ephemeral pool-bound frogs into pitfall buckets. We then counted them, sexed them and released them into the pond. The males often latched onto the females in the buckets.
Were you being factual in your claim about a female vocalizing? That would be unusual in frogs, but anything is possible.
While I was writing this one of my captive Fowlers toads chirped. I had thought they only did breeding calls or alarm calls when picked up, but it turns out the males are surprisingly vocal throughout the year. It’s mostly chirps. Not sure what triggers it.