The Hardin Hollow Farm
The Roundtop Farm
The Trade Branch Farm                                                                             Monday, 13 April 2009

    
      April has finally brought the rains that have eluded us, on and off, for maybe three years now. Even after so many seasons working these farms, we remain surprised, if one actually can remain in a mental state that is governed more by the effects of perception rather than the results of reflection, at how little we know about the breeding habits of the animals that we collect.

     The spring peeper, a little treefrog, has been breeding in our ponds for about a month now. We would have thought that it would have arrived, laid eggs, and then disappeared into the brushy margins of our fields that we take to be its habitat. But it has persisted in hanging around. The American toad, likewise--we thought we'd missed its arrival by way of the egg masses we'd seen--and then it was back some weeks later for another go.

     We put this to, in some manner, the arrival of the rains. The animals are making up for the dry years, and the only question for us now is whether the dry years are becoming part of our--admittedly limited--farm memories. Far more is here at stake than what we do, in the southeast US farmers have been going out of business. We are told that oaks are dying in parts of Texas.  Remember reading about the Dust Bowl? It was coincident with the Great Depression, and we are told that both arrived independently. So, the horsemen may ride together after all.

     The next order of egg-laying will be the green frogs--we heard their first call today--along with the grey treefrogs. Bullfrogs will not be far behind.

     On the good side for us, the spring peeper and the chorus frog now have established themselves well in all of our farms, even though two of the three farms are upland and so do not offer the swale habitat that we would have thought necessary for their propagation. It has taken maybe twenty years for this to happen, but if these, the most delicate of our amphibians, can so extend their ranges, then what are we to say about other species that have been roll-called for extinction?