Well, this year's blog didn't get very far. I don't know what happened to the first frog, but the second hung around for a few weeks. The trouble was, he was always underneath a plank of wood that servers as a stepping stone so we don't tread in the puddle. This meant I couldn't get any photos, even though I knew he was there.

Once he left, no others came along. I can still hear the odd quack in the distance coming from the river a few blocks away, though, so the species isn't going to die out. Actually, I read something a while back saying that numbers of Crinea georgiana are actually increasing.

This is our first quacker of 2007. We were having another dry Winter, but for the last few days of July it's rained a LOT. I thought that after the dry of last year we might not get any Quacking Frogs this year, but this little guys has been happily quacking to himself for three nights now, and I finally found him tonight. He doesn't seem to know about quacking back, so I had to find him the hard way - with a torch & some lucky guesses.
 
This frog isn't quite the same as the Quacking Frogs of other years. For a start, his quack sounds a bit more like a goose honk than a duck's quack. He also looks different - normally, their eyelids are a distinctive bright gold or red, but this frog's are a duller, almost olive gold. He also doesn't appear to have the bright red thighs that are normally so obvious in this species.