21

Immersion

It is late summer, the clouds over the Never Summer Range in north-central Colorado look like snow rather than a summer thunderstorm. I wonder if the metamorphs will survive. I can remember standing on the edge of that pond in the midst of a dark night in early May, throwing snowballs at the stump rising out of the slushy ice in the middle of the pond. Only meters off the road, the snow was thigh deep. No frogs were calling. The stars whined above in their winter way despite the calendar. The absence of amphibian sound and the twinkle of crystal remnants floating out of the blackness of the sky denied a promise of spring. I wrote that 26 years ago. That season gave me the pleasurable thrill of watching firsthand, and for the first time, what has been happening every year since the dawn of amphibians, about 300 million years ago.

The field work hasn’t changed much, and what I wrote then is remarkably accurate (except that now I wear chest waders): In June the water level lapped at the top of my hip waders. I had to watch my step as I grabbed calling males and watchful females. The delicate, unseeable, and unbearably loud chorus frogs frustrated me, and the metallic brown, triangular wood frogs enchanted me with their beauty and insistent call. They were mating, and it felt vaguely wrong to be watching. Now, a quarter of a century later, I can better appreciate the profound wonder of the work but also recognize (and wonder at) the irrational fear that still sets my heart pounding when I take the bags of marked frogs back to their pond—really Erin? Two hours wading around alone in a pond in the dark, but you’re afraid to walk 50 m back to the pond? Crazy. There are many trips where I’m alone, but on other trips there are people to help, new to the world of frogs. Their enthusiasm reminds me of 1995 and the razor-edged excitement of stalking frogs that are so focused on sex that they don’t notice my invasion of their tiny black ocean. The people all do their best, even when they are skunked. But some comments, voiced on frigid, early morning processing sessions, make me realize that not everyone shares a keenness for frogs. The most telling, from a criminal defense attorney and also my childhood friend, was I would shoot myself in the head if this was my job.

It’s late August now and the pond is gone, all the 200% above normal snowpack in the mountains has run off down the Cache la Poudre River. At the pond, the muddy floor sucks at my waders. Large invertebrates, a bizarre cross between shrimp and earwigs, wriggle amongst the grasses. And the froglets, they scurry, as only a tetrapod with a stump of a tail can, in and out of their moist, sedgey forest. Their numbers seem few, compared to the wall of sound produced by their parents in May, but they hide well, cloaking their bronze forms in leaf litter, dropping their lids demurely over riveting gold eyes. This population of chorus frogs (Pseudacris maculata) persists, this species apparently not poised on the brink of disaster. The wonder for me remains, but with it, a tiredness and a pinprick perception of futility in my life as a field biologist. I struggle with this feeling. But at the same time, I chide myself that these are the sentiments of the old, or those who can’t immerse themselves in the watery glory of reflected stars and shouting frogs. I will immerse myself in their ritualized world again this spring, and I know that they have changed me in subtle ways that I may not even be aware of. This knowledge, that the natural world and my profession are intertwined, sustains me and provides a glimmer of optimism for the future.