Maybe a Little Good News about Climate Change
Some little peepers make a surprise return to my neighborhood
When I and my family moved from Hong kong to a house on a couple of wooded acres about ten miles north of Philadelphia 27 years ago, we were pleased the following spring to be seranaded each evening by a raucous chorus of peepers — little tree frogs whose merry chirps in search of a mate let all who heard them know that it was time to plant a garden and that summer was on the way.
Over the years, the size of that chorus slowly declined until 15 years ago we heard just occasional lonely sounding solitary peeps followed by long sad silences.
And then nothing. The peepers were gone. The evenings were quiet. And mosquitos, whose larvae nourished peeper tadpoles and who as adults fed fully grown peepers, proliferated.
The collapse of spring peeper populations in the eastern US was just part of a global die-off of amphibians of all sorts — a class of animals that are particularly vulnerable to environmental insults like herbicides, insecticides, certain easily spread molds and climate change, particularly due to their spending so much time in the water. Eggs and tadpoles, because of their location in the water and adult frogs because of, their skins being perpetually wet, are easier for toxins to penetrate than are the skins and eggs of animals that are land-based and covered in scales, fur or layers of protective dead skin.
It has been so long since I heard a peeper I had forgotten about them. The worsening crises of wars, violent storms, the return of the nuclear threat, rising seas and the possible election of a fascist government in Washington this November had pushed such nostalgic recollections of a different more hopeful time aside.
Bt then suddenly, and wholly unexperctedly, just yesterday evening, at the end of the first real warm day of the year, when the temperature hit 78 degrees Fahrenheit, there they were. And not just a few but uncountable numbers of them, judging from their peeps!
It’s hard to imagine how they suddenly got there. If they were coming back, i would have expected their number to have risen gradually over prior years. Had they been hiding in an odd prolonged kind of hibernation under the bottom of our little vernal pond, re-animating after this spring’s unusual warmth and heavy rainfall, like those brine shrimp in the salt flats of Utah and Southern California’s Owens Valley that appeared in heir billions when record snowfall in the Eastern Rockies melted and refilled Tulare, Mono and Owens lakes after they’d been bone dry for years?
I don’t know the answer to this strange mystery, any more than i can explain the appearance some four years ago on my back porch of a tiny common snapping turtle hatchling, no bigger than a fat quarter. There is no pond or river within a mile of my house from where a mother turtle could have wandered to lay her eggs, and no way that tiny creature could have traveled more than a few feet to reach the porch. Yet there it was! (I put the little critter in a cup of water and drove it a few miles to a nature preserve where i dropped it into a large year-round pond.)
My best guess is that the peepers have returned (somehow and from somewhere) to our property and its vernal pond thanks to several gentler winters that brought little snow but plenty of rain and warmer temperatures.
I have evidence to prove this: Two small windmill palm trees I bought six years ago and planted in protected areas on the east and southwestern sides of my house which have survived and grown since then through six winters — especially the palm on the southwest side closer to the house itself. There are no palm trees that I’ve heard of besides mine in Pennsylvania except in heated greenhouses, but in a moment of dark humor, I planted these trees, figuring if we were going to be doomed by climate catastrophe, with temperatures rising nearly eight degrees fahrenheit by the end of this century, I will hope to live long enough to scoff at nature’s response to our species’ abuse by lying under my palm trees and sipping a Piña Colada.
At the same time, while I suspect that the return of our peepers is either a short-term aberration or a sign of nature going haywire, like my palms growing as if this were Florida, it occurs to me that both phenomena could be signs that nature it hardier and more adaptable than we humans think possible. Could it be that natural selection and evolution could adjust fast enough that life on the planet, instead of suffering an epic die-off worse than the one caused by.a catastrophic asteroid impact 65 million years ago, could change and thrive in a blisteringly hot new world?
For my grandchildren, and all the other grandchildren of this Earth we call home, I fervently hope so.
Peep peep.
Look up Chytrid fungus.
I too have noticed disappearances of tree frogs and peepers from ponds that, 4 years ago had a deafening cacophony.
I hope for a mysterious recovery such as you had.
The only way that we’ll have a fascist government this fall is if “Joe Biden” is reinstalled.