Response
March progresses toward its end, gradually adding to the population. Dark-headed, deep-colored male robins tug at worms on the lawn. Red-winged blackbirds sail low over marshes, or take stations by the edge of a pond, with reedy cries. The purple finches sing, along with the shrill braying of the blue jays. White-throated sparrows, quail, jays, and partridges that have been here all winter are more in evidence, especially on sunny days, and begin to be accompanied by newcomers, like the grackles. Myrtle warblers flutter up into the air and down again, catching insects. But the wind blows. It backs and fills. The rain is cold. The turn toward spring is very gradual, hardly perceptible at times.
Then a few alewives, a dozen or so, come in out of salt water and show up in Stony Brook, familiar strangers, large, pale fish weaving slowly up through the narrow stream. It has begun to be a time of declaration. New patterns, new arrangements are taking place, however much the season seems to lag.
On the evening of the twenty-sixth I hear a high, shrill sound, whirring and spinning, suggesting proud activity, presence set free. The spring peepers are making it known that a time has arrived, and I take joy in the news, having failed to make any definite assurance of it myself. Their sound embraces all this changing land, rising above the whispered roars of the sea.
Now the perpetrator of this chorus is a tiny tan frog with a smudged cross or X on its back, named Hyla Crucifer. The male of the species has been speaking up on behalf of spring openings for millions of years. In that capacity it is authoritative enough. Its voice, almost incredibly loud and shrill for an animal that is not much over an inch long, is amplified by means of a large bubblelike pouch which acts as a resonator. This mechanism is put to use after the animal comes out of winter torpor, after warm rain, and as the season itself breathes and sounds more freely. The peeper moves around with the earth itself and makes a declaration which, it seems to me, does not deserve the term automatic any more than the fiddling of grasshoppers in August. Both are part of the deep and various play of the year. In any case this specialty of voice is something of a marvel in itself. It is not like the eyes of an owl that are so made as to make maximum use of dim light, or the wings of a herring gull that can ride turbulent air currents above the water, or like the fins of a fish, the sensitive nose of a dog. The peeper’s vocal parts are not specialized for environmental use to that degree. Their primary, specific function is to attract the female. Mating and voice are synonymous. But perhaps we could also say that this mating cry, this sometimes bell-like sound, is fitted to the whole environment, that it belongs unerringly to a new earth and a new season. It seems to bring life and place, function and expression together. It is unequivocal. It is perfect. It speaks up reliably on behalf of everything now springing or about to spring.
For all their vast population in the bogs, ponds, edges, swamps, and other wet areas of the Cape, individual spring peepers are very hard to find. During a cool evening, as the stars begin to declare themselves, I hear the peepers’ collective voice rising up around me, passing into the sky. On the banks of Berry’s Hole, that deep, swampy hollow nearby, there is a pulsing, piercing, deafening chorus. The wind suddenly blows over in a loud torrent, but the peepers keep on. I walk farther down and they stop; then they begin again, after I sit still for a minute or two. The banks are wet, after a light afternoon rain, and they must be covered by frogs, judging by the sound; but I search every bit of ground with a flashlight and am unable to find a single one.
A wild, moist spring wind flings around the rim of the hollow, which is gray, dusted with fog, and in the clear opening overhead the stars fling out and away. Water stands dark and still where the banks end. Grass hummocks and shrubs choke the wet areas beyond. I sit for many minutes concentrating on one area with my flashlight. The peepers’ cry is deafening. Then at last, I see one. It jumps onto my shoes. And then another, on a low lying branch, moving along in the light—it displaces a third, which is toppled down into the leaves. They seem limp in action. A peeper is minute, almost weightless in my hand.
Nearby footsteps will silence them. They react spontaneously like tadpoles and minnows that dart off into deep water from a pond’s edge when you approach. Yet they are not bothered by the beam of a flashlight.
Such a tiny thing, this animal, this cool, moist, anonymous amphibian, for so proud a message! I can see that a peeper’s whole body pumps as it calls. It is like a bellows, and the vocal sac blows out like a blister, bluish-green in the light. “Peep-peep-peep,” and the whole night is filled with an insistent, stirring cry. No human statement can rival this simple, triumphant mode of revelation. The earth begins again.