Syracuse.com - Montezuma Wildlife Refuge gives public hands-on experience with 'Frog Watch'

[HuntingNY-News]

It's important for refuge staff to know what species are present, so they can monitor different populations and their habitats.

A spring peeper. Tom Meier  

Seneca Falls—All you need to assist Montezuma Wildlife Refuge's official conservation work is a pair of ears and a data sheet.

A conservation biology class from Hobart and William Smith Colleges got to try their ear at "frog surveying" recently —a program called Frog Watch that consists of listening for different frog calls on the refuge and recording the results.

Citizen volunteers fan out around the refuge on Tuesday and Thursday evenings during the spring to survey its frog population, which consists of nine species of frogs and one kind of toad. Montezuma Wildlife Biologist Linda Ziemba said that this year they've been overrun with volunteers willing to help.

"People of all ages come out to do this," Ziemba said. "Sometimes we've had staff who want to do a frog survey one night and we have to tell them that all the points are taken by citizen volunteers."

It's important for refuge staff to know what species are present, so they can monitor different populations and their habitats, Ziemba said.

HWS Biology Professor Bradley Cosentino brought his senior conservation biology class to the refuge after teaching them how to analyze data sheets from other wildlife parks.

"This kind of thing generates an appreciation and an enthusiasm for nature that you can't always garner in the classroom," Cosentino said. "And then we're also doing citizen science, which is important to learning about real world issues like climate change."

After briefing the group of students on Montezuma's conservation efforts and the importance of Frog Watch, Ziemba and Cosentino took them out to small ponds around the refuge, where they listened for frog calls for three minutes at a time. They then recorded the wind and noise levels at that location, the intensity of the frog calling and the species of frogs heard.

These data sheets would normally be used for official data collection on the refuge, but due to the excessive wind that night, it was impossible to get an accurate reading on frog calls and the data sheets were used only for the students' practice.

HWS Senior Hollie Dunn said this is the hands-on continuation of what they'd been learning in conservation biology. "We've been looking at these data sheets, and now we know what those people actually did to record what was there," she said. "It makes the learning process more complete."

Despite the wind, the students were able to identify at least one species of frog at different ponds around the refuge -- spring peepers.

With eight permanent staff members and 10,000 acres of refuge, Ziemba said volunteers at Montezuma are a must.

"We wouldn't be able to accomplish what we do without the help of citizen volunteers," Ziemba said. "If not for them, we wouldn't be getting near as much done."

Ziemba said she hoped the students had a heightened sense of wildlife awareness after Frog Watch.

"These students may not go into wildlife management when they graduate," Ziemba said. "But I hope they carry with them the importance of protecting land and giving back to the community."

FROGS/TOADS AT MONTEZUMA:

The following are the frogs and toads inhabiting the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge: spring peepers, wood frogs, western chorus frogs, northern leopard frogs, southern leopard frogs, green frogs, gray tree frogs, pickerel frogs, bull frogs and American toads.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog