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Trail Wood #91 Earl Plato

Ed Teale and wife Nellie, flashlights in hand walk the northern edge of their pond. The calls of the gray tree frog greets them in this April 23rd log.
“I run three beam of my light up the mottled trunk. It reveals-like two thicker fragments of bark a foot apart-the almost perfectly camouflaged bodies of two singers clinging with padded feet to the tree. A plane drones overhead in the night. All the spring peepers and all the gray tree frogs redouble their efforts. Even in midday we notice how the sound of a plane moving across the sky above them sets these frogs to calling.
Watching in the light of our double beams we are fascinated as always by the throat sac of the gray tree frog. It-as does the throat sac of the peeper-expands like a shining balloon. Then when the call is reached it collapses and disappears suddenly as though the tree frog has swallowed it. “Bubble-gum frogs” is the name a friend of ours once applied to these batrachians. Again and again we observe how the creature’s sides draw in as the sac swells distending farther and farther vibrating with the intensity of the fluttering call, then disappearing in its sudden contraction.”