Did I just miss the frogs singing and calling to their potential mates this year? No, I don’t think so, at least not entirely.
What has been happening in recent years, and what few of us have been willing to admit, is that we’ve been killing them in increasing numbers. I recently mentioned only a few weeks ago that I heard them outside starting their annual chorus and was cheerfully awaiting the massive “Ode to Spring” this year, but it never came.
Oh, there were attempts of a few frogs to clear their throats and warble a bit, but that was about all. Why?
Well, to begin with, I’ve often mentioned in past columns that when I was spinning records in the evenings at KELA — and seasonally when the local swarm of frogs behind the station began their annual chants to seek love — I’d open the back door and share that music with everyone else.
I had left that job before their choir faded into only memories. But there was still a spot left that, when a person was driving north from Chehalis to Centralia along National Avenue and reached the point in the road just before it meets Northeast Kresky, you could still hear the courting efforts of those delightful, little living and breathing creatures off to the left.
It didn’t take long for that, too, to fade away into nothing. Then, after moving into my mobile home, situated a few blocks south of the pond that you can see briefly as you approach the city from the north on Interstate 5, the frog colony had apparently found a new home, but it was for an even shorter period this time.
Why is this happening? Simple, we’re killing them, that’s why. Nationwide, we’re doing it at a rate of 3.7% per year, but it’s greater in the Northwest, according to documentation. It’s now predicted that within the next 20 years some species will disappear in about half of the habitation they now occupy.
You see, they breathe through their skin. Any poison stays inside as they’re constantly exposed to the environment. We, unlike our little friends, can at least exhale some of our toxins, if that gives us any confidence.
Two hundred frog species have already disappeared, according to one count. So what are we doing about it? The “usual.” A National Program of Amphibian Monitoring, Recording and Conservation has been established. That’s about all, and you know, I suspect how “effective” such groups can sometimes be.
I’m sure going to miss those sweet spring songs, but slipping away from that topic, I have something else — actually not all that different — I’d like to share with you. Back in the days when I lived on North Washington Street here in Centralia, it was in a house that had a beautiful, large backyard.
On quiet, summer evenings, my neighbor often came over and we’d sit in the yard with possibly something in our hands intended to make the evening a bit more enjoyable.
We’d look toward the east and watch a few — hardly ever more than a dozen or so — bats as they erratically flew through the air in search for the bugs and insects that otherwise might have disturbed us in some way or another.
They came out of the attic of a building across the alley. It’s now a three-story apartment building, but it had once been the hospital of a doctor who had lived where we now did. (It wasn’t an unknown practice in those days. For instance, my first wife’s uncle had his own hospital in a building that’s still standing on the eastside of Gold Street on the way to Chehalis.)
But I digress.
Anyway, back to the bats. They came from the attic of that former hospital and did nothing more damaging than seek insects, which eventually might possibly have been damaging to us. They were afraid of people and wouldn’t come close.
There were humans on the ground, though, who thought dire thoughts, such as the unlikely event the bats might be able to fly into the hair of a woman (although none had ever been documented at doing so), or more likely, spread the plague.
It was a lovely, quiet show to watch on those summer evenings and I miss it almost as much as I do the singing frogs. Oh, and what eventually happened to those silent hunters? They were all deliberately poisoned, of course.
Shortly after I wrote that, I learned that it’s illegal to kill bats in England.
Do they know something we don’t or are we merely depending on “old wives tales” and vampire movies to guide us?
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
