Foothill Yellow-legged Frog

[Dutchocrat]

This Sunday I joined Lawrence (calfirecap), Yolodave, and Corey in a survey of a 2 mile section of the Soquel Creek in the Soquel Demonstration Forest.

While Lawrence and Corey did all the hard work (finding specimen to place on rocks for voucher photos), Dave and I were able to get some nice photos of yellow legged frogs and newts (in addition to clouds of Ladybugs covering rocks and plants).

Surprisingly, the frogs were very cooperative posing, thus the photo quality was only limited by equipment and photographer skills.
While taking pictures of one adult yellow legged frog, a fly showed the Darwinian skill to land within striking distance of the frog, with the expected result. Three consecutive images are shown here.

To my surprise, the tongue of the frog looked more like a wad of chewing gum than a tongue. Things happened so fast that I cannot even tell if the frog actually did get the fly. The pictures are inconclusive, but I hope he did (BTW, this was a lifer for me).





Thanks Lawrence for organizing this.

Dutchocrat

[El Garia]

Great capture, Dutch! I can't say that I've ever seen a photo of a R. boylii feeding. Very cool shot!

Also- Congrats on your lifer…

-Derek

[Calfirecap]

Awesome photos series Wim!

Here's a few of the Lady bugs that were out in force:








For those wondering, this survey was not posted beforehand as, for veracious reasons including minimizing impact, I had to limit the number of participants to just 4.

There will be a survey open to all NAFHA in the Spring. I need to get out there and place a new board line and give it some time to season first.

Lawrence

[Porter]

Nice shots, both of you! I wanna see the frog take down a mouthfull of those ladybirds

[hellihooks]

Soquel is Swell...