April 2006
The Lion and the Frog
It is spring time on
the Ranch and the frogs are in love. Frog music will be heard every night in
the canyons for the next couple of months, but as you travel down 101 towards
Santa Barbara, the music fades to nothing. You may hear an occasional “croak”
but the frogs are mostly gone from Santa Barbara’s canyons. Frogs are
disappearing all over the world because of habitat loss, invasive species like
bullfrogs, water pollution, and now, an epidemic of a skin fungus that is
killing entire populations within a few seasons. It’s a bad time to be green,
as Kermit might say, unless you live somewhere like Hollister Ranch. Our frogs
are happy, healthy, and abundant, and with a little care, we can help them prosper.
The science of ecology
teaches us about the many connections between living things. Sometimes these
connections can be surprising and remind us how little we actually know about
the natural world. One of the reasons the Ranch has such healthy frog populations
is that we have almost no raccoons prowling our streams eating everything they
can find. Raccoons will not thrive on the Ranch as long as we have so many
mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats and fox, all of them eager to eat a nice,
tasty raccoon. If we were to lose our predators, a larger raccoon population
would decimate our frogs. Keep the lions and we save the frogs!
We have two common frog
species on the Ranch. Our large frog is the notorious California Red-Legged
Frog, or “CRLF;” notorious because it is listed as a “threatened” species and
the Endangered Species Act prohibits any “incidental take” of this frog or
destruction of its habitat. Anyone seeking a permit for construction on the
Ranch anywhere near a stream will have to account for its presence. This frog
is always found near water, basking on the bank. Usually you see the young ones
that are 2-3 inches long. Mature adults are the size of a bullfrog, up to 5-6
inches long. This is our largest native frog and rare in most of the state. They
live to be 8 to 10 years old but very few survive to adulthood. Its call is a
gentle, deep-voiced croak. They lay their eggs about this time of year in pools
with emergent vegetation.
Our small frog, the
Pacific Treefrog, is usually about 1 inch long and either
brown or green with a black eye stripe. It can change color in minutes and is
found in all kinds of habitat. It is only in the water during breeding season
and the rest of the year it will be hunkered down in some moist hiding spot.
This is the frog that creates the “ribit ribit ribit” frog chorus that we
are so used to hearing and is now the standard frog sound for Hollywood movies.
This tough little frog is in no danger of extinction anywhere in its range and
can even be found in the backyards of Goleta tract homes.
Frog
Conservation
Our frogs are pretty
hardy and mainly need a good pool of clean water to breed in that will last
long enough for the tadpoles to grow to maturity. Keeping the cows out of the
creeks by having water for them on the hillsides allows more stream-side
vegetation, which the frogs like. (HROA, with the help of the Watershed
Committee and Cattle Co-Op, has installed some 19 hillside watering troughs
which serve over 6,000 acres of cow pasture as part of this effort.) We must never
allow bullfrogs or crayfish to become established on the Ranch, as they will
wipe out the native frogs.
The other big problem
for frogs is herbicides like Roundup and Rodeo and just about any pesticide.
Since frog skin absorbs water and anything in it, even very low concentrations
of herbicides and pesticides will kill tadpoles and young frogs. So please mow
your weeds, don’t spray them, and help keep our frogs happy and healthy.