Blanchard's Cricket Frog

About the Blanchard's Cricket Frog

A frog the size of a thumbnail with a leap that seems physically unreasonable - several feet in a single startled bound, often ending with a skitter clean across the water's surface. Blanchard's Cricket Frogs line the muddy edges of ponds, creeks, and stock tanks all across Texas, and most encounters begin with that leap.

The call is the sound of summer water here: a metallic clicking like two pebbles tapped together, slow at first, then accelerating - gick, gick, gick-gick-gick. A full chorus on a June night runs like a bag of marbles being shaken.

For all their abundance in Texas, cricket frogs are vanishing mysteriously from the northern parts of their range, which has made this little frog a subject of serious research. They are short-lived - most complete their entire life in around a year - so a population lives or dies on every summer's breeding.

No two are patterned quite alike: the ragged back stripe runs green, rust, or gray over warty brown skin, camouflage good enough that the frog you photograph is usually the fifth one you saw and the first four were leaps.