The Big Night of the peepers and pals

I missed the Big Night of the amphibians this year, if indeed there even was one. But I know that they emerged because the peepers are giving full throat now to the vernal chorus.  

I stopped on a gravel road one evening last week and heard them calling from the wet woodlands nearby even before I turned off my engine. There is nothing so insistent as a swamp full of tree frogs with mating on the mind.  

Amid their high notes I caught the deeper rasp of wood frogs, indicating that this was an ephemeral wetland and supports vernal pool species.  I suspect that if I were to visit the site today — a day that is spitting bitter sleet and blowing down trees — I would see egg masses below the surface, clear evidence that spring will come.

My uncle has emailed our family new pictures from southeast Massachusetts of the herring run in the Agawam river, an event that along with the returning ospreys signifies the turning of the season in that part of the world.  

I can remember changes in other lands where I have lived that anticipated the return of summer rains in a dry country, when baobab trees would start to flower above the Kalahari sands.  

I don’t know how the trees knew it was time to propagate without the trigger of rainfall or significantly increased daylight in that latitude, but each one awoke from dormancy, attracting bats to its beautiful flowers that smelled like rotting fruit.  

The natural temperature and precipitation range and variation in our environment plays out in complex ways that we comprehend imperfectly. I feel that this winter has been abnormally prolonged, and indeed there is evidence of a spring delayed. But is it really outside the norm for the trillium and bloodroot to have barely broken the surface of the freezing soil? Two years ago, both were fully in flower, but in Connecticut bloodroot can bloom anytime between March and May, and trillium from April to June.   

I am eager for the regular progression of spring events because I still have the heat on and I want to set my garden to rights.  I want to open the windows and give the quilts a good airing before packing them away in the cedar trunk. 

Instead, I turn my collar up, like the tightly furled leaves of the wild leek shoots that are poking tentatively up through the earth, and delay that much-anticipated moment until conditions are more favorable.  

It is a good survival strategy, waiting for the right moment — unless you are a spring peeper.  Then it’s off to the pool and never mind the weather.  Love, or what passes for it in the hearts of tiny frogs, conquers all.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.