Carolina gopher frog. (Photo by Aubrey M. Heupel, Frogs and Toads of NC website)
Some people say they sound like an old man snoring. I think they sound like someone dragging a stick across a large ribbed washboard, or maybe even a gator bellowing. But whatever you think they sound like, Carolina gopher frogs simply aren’t sounding off their characteristic low-frequency vibrating call in as many places as they used to. And where they do remain, there are just less of them. (Compare a gopher frog call here, with a gator bellow here.)
Carolina gopher frog (Rana capito) numbers mirror the downward trend line of so many amphibians worldwide, unfortunately. And their last habitat hold-outs in N.C. are on public lands and military installations. I wrote about Carolina gopher frogs, and the monitoring work that NC State Univ. Nick Haddad is doing to help them, in the Charlotte Observer a few weeks ago. You can read the story, “Rare frogs find a military home,” here. As the story states, only about 100 to 150 of the rare frogs are thought to live on Fort Bragg and they are listed as “threatened” by the state. On Fort Bragg, they have a deep affinity for the artillery impact zones on the base because fires sparked by munitions groom longleaf pine ecosystems which the frogs depend upon. (more…)
