
| from the April 13, 2009 Newsletter, issued from Siskiyou
National Forest west of Grants Pass, Oregon: PACIFIC TREEFROG On my first walk through the woods, on a chilly, drizzly afternoon, I came upon the frog shown above. That's a Pacific Treefrog, HYLA REGILLA, whose treefrogness is suggested by rounded toe-pads, adhesive for climbing trees, on the somewhat camouflaged foot atop the leaf immediately below the frog's throat. Back in Mississippi we could look for about eleven members of the Treefrog Family, the Hylidae, but here the distribution maps in my field guide indicate only one species present. Pacific Treefrogs are a varied lot, their basic skin color ranging from green to light tan to black. The black stripe through the eye seems fairly constant but the field guide says that usually there's a dark triangle between their eyes, but ours doesn't have that. from the September 4, 2005 Newsletter, issued from the
Sierra Nevada Foothills east of Sacramento, California:
The list of frogs and toads potentially found around Natchez, Mississippi, where I lived in recent years, bore ten treefrog species, and often identifying the treefrogs I ran across was a real challenge. Here treefrog identification is a cinch because there's only one member of the Treefrog Family, and that's the Pacific Treefrog. |