The Spring Peepers are out again. You can visit a wetland almost anywhere in the eastern US on a warm spring night, especially when it is raining or has just rained, and hear them. They are said to sound like baby chickens, and I guess they do, but a chorus is a jingling mess, with thousands of tiny songsters vying for females.
I went to a couple of sites near where I live to hear them, and record my observations for Frogwatch USA. They can be found at http://www.nwf.org/frogwatchUSA/ . Just copy this link and paste it into your browser. I'm too lazy to code out the HTML.
Unfortunately, I do not live in the country, but in the suburb, but even there, there are plenty of frog sites, and I have three very near the Western NC Nature Center. Two of them have Wood and Pickerel Frogs too, all three species are reputed to have antifreeze in their blood, so they won't freeze on those early spring nights that dip into the 20's.
At the top of this entry, you can see an egg mass left by at least two Wood Frog pairs. Woodies tend to aggregate their eggs for a number of reasons, the two top reasons said to be to hoard heat in the middle of the mass (for those sub freezing nights) and to swamp any egg predators - anybody eating from a mass would get full before eating the whole mass, so if you are a Wood Frog pair, you have a higher chance of producing babies if you deposit along with others.
