The teeming amphibians ecstatically multiplied, even as much of humanity sank into another engulfing wave of infection.
There is always mating business to be getting on with and only a month or so to get it done.
So don’t do that, for as the Hudson Valley light goes pearly and the afternoons stretch out, the superficial body ice of the frogs melts away and, along with that decrystallising resurrection, wild singing begins: at first a mere teatime tuning up by scattered vocalists, but by sunset building into a massive chorus, an entire Albert Hall-ful of peepers. A twist from your fingers could snap a leg. So if you were to come across a wood frog in deep winter, or expose a tiny peeper beneath the leaf litter, their sparkling, gelid rigidity would lead you to assume they were dead. To help matters, wood frogs can recycle urea through their urine. Seventy per cent of the frogs’ body water can then freeze without compromising the organs that will magically reawaken in the spring. When ice crystals begin to form on their skins, their livers flood the bloodstream with glucose, sending vital organs like the heart, its beating paused, into a dormant but protected state. They and the peepers survive bitter winters by means of antifreeze cryoprotectants stored within their bodies. In recent years, the soprano peepers have been accompanied by a bass rhythm section – wood frogs, Lithobates sylvaticus, a tattoo of deep quacking, punctuated by raspy burps. Their blown-out song bags are nearly as big as the rest of them it’s all they are: innocently inflated peeps of expectation.
The peepers are so tiny – an inch or so long – that you’ll never see one, no matter how carefully you creep up on them. Down in the swampy wetlands below our house in Hudson Valley, New York, millions of Pseudacris crucifer (“cross-bearing false locusts” but actually minute frogs) puffed up their air sacs and warbled for a mate. I n March 2021, the 13th month of the Covid confinement, the peepers, in their vast multitudes, sang out again.
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