Catching Frogs

by SARA DYKMAN

Net at the ready, I tiptoe like a heron at the border between boulder skin and liquid soul. My footsteps displace mud and send rippled spirals beyond my grasp. I haven’t seen a frog in eleven minutes, and in this space my mind has wandered. My thoughts have landed on flowers, skittered with bird shadows, and paused in prayer at the feet of a just-emerged dragonfly. The stretch of time also stretches my worries; what if I don’t see another frog? What if the past holds a tighter grip on now than the future does?

PLOP!

My task clicks back into focus. I turn to the sound and watch a puff of sediment stir where a frog has fled. “Big one!” I shout.

A wahooo echoes across the lake as my coworker twirls her net like a pom-pom in shared celebration. Our triumph is premature. Hearing a frog doesn’t provide the data we need to understand the effectiveness of our conservation efforts. For our research to be robust, we need to catch as many frogs as possible and collect data from each. Still, a plopping frog is never a bad sign.  

Giddy from the fleeting frog, I want to lunge after this good news, but boulders and deep cutbanks complicate net swipes. Instead of mucking up the water and my chances, I resign myself to stillness. Someone once told me that to catch a frog you must think like a frog.

In a nest of pink-tipped heather, I wait. Sun rays relax time, while a cloud of mosquitoes gathers around me. I swat at the hungry beasts with little gusto. If I don’t feed the mosquitoes, then who will feed the frogs? All the while, moisture from the ground crawls capillary style, until my pants are saturated with Sierra snowmelt turned summer lakeshore. I squirm, trying to shake the discomfort and focus my energy on scanning the places where land and lake blur. Despite the bug bites, cold wind, and soggy butt, my eyes keep up their pacing vigilance. My plan is to watch—half-captivated, half-captive—until two eyes break the surface like bubbles in a soda. I once told someone that in order to catch frogs you must first let them catch you.

I revel in the lingering. Twenty years ago, at this same shore, I wouldn’t have found a single frog to tie my time to. Like 93 percent of the mountain yellow-legged frog’s historic range, there would have only been the ghost of a frog-filled time.

The frog’s drastic erasure began in the 1800s when non-native trout were dumped into the High Sierra food chain. The fish were carried—first in coffee cans and later in airplanes—past the steep, rocky barriers that had stopped them for ten thousand years. Unleashed, they decimated the aquatic insects, robbed bird chicks of future meals, and devoured the mountain yellow-legged frogs, one tadpole at a time.

Then came the next big blow. In the 1970s, the remaining frogs, surviving in still-fishless lakes, began to die off in massive numbers. Researchers found themselves locked in a nightmare. They visited lakes and found thousands of lifeless, belly-up frogs had replaced the vibrant plops and splashes of healthy populations. The chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), was named as the culprit. This pathogen caused amphibian declines in the Sierra, as well as the extinctions or near-extinctions of at least five hundred amphibian species worldwide. I have yet to see a die-off, and so I arrive at every lake with my heart in my throat. I wish I could stockpile my tears, so that when the moment comes, I might wash the sight away.

Though I haven’t seen any die-offs, I’ve witnessed the loneliness of their aftermath. I’ve spent too many days walking now-frogless lakes and have been forced to mourn a disturbing truth: In less than a century, the mountain yellow-legged frogs went from being the most abundant vertebrate in the Sierra to critically endangered.

A tadpole skitters into my view like an intermission for my worried soul. The story isn’t over, the ballooned creature reminds me. A new chapter began in 1990 when fish stocking ended in the Sierra. Another chapter began when the National Park Service began to remove fish from a handful of remote lakes, including the one reflecting the sky at my feet.

Fish-free once again, the next step was to either wait and hope frogs wandered back or move frogs like pawns in a high-stakes game of biological chess. Since fish act like gates to keep frogs from connecting watersheds, researchers chose the latter. Thus the next question became: which frogs should be moved?

Though most populations of mountain yellow-legged frogs are extirpated by Bd soon after infection levels spike, some populations aren’t erased completely. The survivors of these rare and remarkable populations endure, mate, lay eggs, and give rise to a rebound. These populations can’t climb to historic densities because of the Bd infections, but at smaller numbers they seem to be able to persist.

In the early 2000s, over a century after Sierran frogs were first displaced, adult mountain yellow-legged frogs from a nearby persistent population were packed into Tupperware and carried to the same shore where I now stand. Released, their task was to be the future. Armed with their unseen, unidentified resilience, they did just that. They laid eggs, their tadpoles developed over three anxious years, and another three years were spent waiting for the subadults to reach reproductive age. Good news greeted researchers six years into the reintroduction. The frogs were persisting.

On cue, the water vibrates. The surface tension breaks from a just-buoyed frog. Our eyes connect: my grateful gaze and her more skeptical one lock together in the here and now. I hold my smile and—in slow motion—I move the net over the frog’s head like a passing cloud. I steady my body, and then in a burst I meet the water, fight the aquatic resistance, and pull the net across her path. When I bring up the net, it is alive with the frog’s frantic energy. “It’s okay, beautiful,” I whisper. “This will only take a minute.” One minute to add to the two decades of work righting a wrong. 

My hand circles the frog’s slippery waist like a belt. She is likely the great-grandchild of those first frogs released. Her powerful legs kick at the air while I pull a swab from its sterile packaging. Like an artist painting perfection, I brush the swab over her stomach, thighs, and webbed feet. In the thirty strokes that our protocol dictates, I have time to note her yellow hue and speckled pattern. She is summer and mountain and beauty and wildness. She is the answer to the hope bobbing in my heart: despite a litany of wrongs, I may be able to grow old in a frog-filled future.

Back at the lab, the swab will be analyzed for Bd. I don’t hope for a Bd negative result. I accept the fact that once Bd is detected it can’t just disappear. Instead, I long for the worst to be over, and like an old scar, for the damage to begin to fade. If the lab work reveals low spore counts, then we know the frog is coping with infection. Coping, surviving, reproducing. I smile as I imagine a future field technician lunging after this frog’s great-grandkids in a decade. 

“Thanks,” I tell the granite-painted lady. I open my palm. She lingers for a second and then vaults back to her home. I fill out my data sheet, then I stand to continue my search for frogs. For solutions. For good news.

I hear another plop and smile.