A friend asked me the other day if I’d heard the spring peepers yet. She had, and also had a friend who‘d called up and spread the happy word. They’ve been in full throat at Hart’s Pond after the recent relatively mild nights.
Though there may be stubborn rearguard actions as winter retreats, the peepers’ pipings proclaim the Spring’s triumph of warmth and light. When you hear them, when I hear them, we know their chirping is a surer sign of the softening season than any tree full of robins.
(Click on arrow above to hear the spring peepers calling.)
The peepers chant, drawing the spring dusk over the meadow. The mating song of the tiny male frogs (Pseudacris crucifer )fades even as the season swells.
Robert Frost, in his poem, “Hyla Brook,” makes good use of their spare singing: “By June our brook’s run out of song and speed and taken with it all the Hyla breed that shouted in the mist a month ago…”
The brook has either “gone groping underground,” or “flourished come up in jewel weed.”
I’ll not parse Frost. I’ll take him at face-value. A vernal bog full of mating song is a promise of things to come, of life fostered by warmth and wet.
It’s well-known Spring is the least of our seasons. The peepers and their tentative brook are at once the least but surest of all Spring’s messengers who perform their brief and pretty turns and exit the year’s stage quietly.
