Lately I have not been getting out to go herping very much (haven’t been writing much either). I have been traveling a lot, and the time I’ve got has been dealt out between extra hours at work and wedding-related tasks and celebrations. I’m not getting married until the end of October, mind you, but it’s already keeping me from getting out. In the spring I was hitting the woods at least a couple times a week. Now I feel lucky to make it out once a week to spend twenty minutes hunting for worms, and the lack of activity is driving me nuts. The weather doesn’t help either. I don’t like wandering around outdoors when it’s in the 90s, and neither do most herps. You’ll find maybe some frogs and toads hopping around where it’s wet, but that’s about it.

I have yet to take up road cruising – driving around at night when the herps are moving and trying to catch the ones that try to cross the road, but that would probably be more productive. Maybe if it’s been raining and I know I don’t have to wake up too early in the morning I’ll head out over the bridge to Jersey and try driving around the Pine Barrens. Am I too lazy? I could claim environmental concerns keep me from road cruising – all that gasoline you burn driving around all night.

This Tuesday I spent all of twenty minutes near Cobbs Creek looking for some worms. It’s not too hard to find nightcrawlers there – the really big Chinese ones. A lot of people don’t know that nightcrawlers in this area are exotic invasive worms (see http://www.wvnps.org/earthworms.html), a fact that takes away any qualms I have about feeding them to Shorty, my shortheaded garter snake (Thamnophis brachystoma).

Anyhow, I was out there getting worms after work, and I heard the bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) calling. It was around eight o’clock, and I’m not sure when they started, but it made me feel like I had found something. You’ve probably heard bullfrogs – they rumble out a deep call that sounds kind of like “jug-o-rum.” ‘Bullfrog’ seems like the right name for them. They have the same kind of awesome, bulky presence as a large bull. If I had to come up with a new name, I might call them hog frogs – think of those gigantic hogs as big as oil drums. Bullfrogs eat any moving creature they can fit in their mouths. One of my coworkers put some bullfrog tadpoles in the pond in her back yard along with the fish. Now there are just two bullfrogs – one on each side of the pond.

I was helping clear invasive exotic plants near the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Center in the Spring with a team of AmeriCorps volunteers when one of them found a bullfrog. The beast completely filled her hand, and its fat gut brimmed over the sides. It just sat there, letting itself be paraded around, almost proudly, delighted to show off just how fat a frog can get. Now that frog’s sitting in the high grass by the water and bellowing into the night.