A hundred ways to be a frog

One of a series of blog posts written during the Field Museum's 2010 Yaguas rapid inventory of Yaguas, Peru, and published by the New York Times.

"As [the herpetologists] work, the beams of their headlamps go sweeping restlessly through the forest, back and forth, up and down, pausing a second and then moving on. Sometimes both of them look up at the same time, illuminating the forest from the ground to the canopy, and for a few seconds that stretch of forest stands in perfect cross section, backlit by their searchlights. Then their lights fall back down to a shrub, or go running up the trunk of a tree, or pause on a bromeliad, or return to the leaf litter, flitting this way and that to show you all the different places you might find a frog in this part of the world. Jonh’s light has a yellowish cast and is concentrated in a beam like the headlight of a train; Rudolf’s is whiter and more diffuse, like a bright lamp. Whenever you see the yellow light and the white light stop their sweeping, come together and focus on the same place, you know they’ve found something....."

Read the full post here.

Photo by Álvaro del Campo