Memorial Day, With Frogs

Senator Bernie Sanders, just before I shook his hand

Vergennes has a grand parade on Memorial Day.  For a small town (excuse me, "city") this is a big parade.  Just a bit smaller, maybe, than Lexington's Patriot's Day parade.  It's significant enough that the governor of Vermont marches (Peter Shumlin, Democrat and good guy, by the way) and a Senator, our favorite socialist, Bernie Sanders.  I called Vergennes a city, and it really is a city, with a mayor and city council.  True, there are only 2,670 people in Vergennes, but it was chartered in 1788 as a city, not a town.  There were high hopes for its economy at the time, what with Otter Creek Falls for power, access to shipping via Lake Champlain, and the largest ironworks in the country nearby, an industry that supplied iron fittings for the fleet that would defeat the British on the Lake Champlain in the war of 1812.  

There were the fire engines, the old cars, horses, the madcap Shriners, high school marching bands, veterans and military trucks, lovely teens ("Miss Teenage Vermont"), and a few paraders that told you this was Vermont, not Lexington, Massachusetts.  One such was the parade of old tractors.


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Each night for a week or more we have been hearing frogs carrying on from the pond area.  

It’s a nightly concert, every frog joining in at random and seeming to want to out-sing every other frog.  Trills, croaks, snorts, whistles, beeps.  What a cacophony.  I’ve tracked it down, and the source of the noisiest and most dominant sound is the grey tree frog.  It has a resonating–and I mean resonating–trill, lower in pitch than the spring peeper.  Louder too, by far.  

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a grey tree frog.  Not surprising, as it’s tiny, only between an inch or two, and may be green or grey, depending on the color of whatever it’s sitting on.  We hear other frog voices that try to be heard over the din of the grey tree frogs.  I’m sure we’re hearing some northern leopard frogs as they are widespread and, what’s more, are the official state amphibian of Vermont.  I like the description of its call.  It’s likened to “the twang of a loose banjo string.”  Others we could be hearing are the mink frog that has an almost electronic-sounding croak.  It’s called a mink frog, by the way, because it reportedly smells like mink.  “To those unfamiliar with mink” (i.e., most of us), Wikipedia tells us, the odor is “more akin to rotting onions.”  Chances are I will never get close enough to check this out.  

We may also be hearing the green frog that sounds pretty much like a bullfrog, including the “loose banjo string” call description. There may also be pickerel frogs (they like pickerel weed and we might have some) with a call that sounds like “a short snore.” I think I heard that.  It’s probably too late in the season for the Vermont wood frog (electronic-sounding croaks) and the peepers (high-pitched trills), but, goodness knows, they could be singing too in the background.   


In the daytime, Harry often walks the perimeter of the pond, frogs leaping away from him right and left.  This doesn’t seem to stir any predatory instinct, for he doesn’t snap at them or do much except keep walking, or sit and stare. I like to think he is taken with the wonder of it.