Subject: Oregon spotted frog's best friend
Date: May 13 19:01:50 2002
From: Kevin Li - kdli at msn.com


>From today's Seattle P-I:
Spotting spotted frogs is a passion
Biologist tracks the very rare creatures amid the swamps of the Black River
Monday, May 13, 2002
By SUSAN GORDON
SCRIPPS-MCCLATCHY WESTERN SERVICE
TACOMA -- Two strokes of the hind legs were all wildlife biologist Kelly McAllister needed. He plunged an arm into shallow, muddy water and immediately yanked out a brownish green frog so rare that herpetologists say its species may die out.
Years of counting Oregon spotted frogs in a rural Thurston County cow pasture have made McAllister wise to their movements -- slow, as frogs go -- and other kinds of behavior, such as mating and reproduction.
"Now that I know what the frogs do, it's a piece of cake, but it took a long time to figure that stuff out," McAllister said.
Officially, Kelly McAllister is the state Department of Fish and Wildlife's district wildlife biologist for Pierce and Thurston counties. Unofficially, he's the Oregon spotted frog's best friend.
"He lives and breathes spotted frogs," said Port Blakely Tree Farms wildlife biologist Tim McBride, who has known McAllister since 1995 and now helps him track the frogs.
Few herpetologists are more familiar with them than McAllister. "What I would add to what Kelly would say is not much," said David Green, a professor at McGill University in Montreal.
Oregon spotted frogs used to be called Western spotted frogs. That is until Green coined the new name for them. His genetic research proved a significant difference between Oregon spotted frogs and their cousins, Columbia spotted frogs, which live mostly east of the Cascade Mountains.
Despite McAllister's knowledge, he's still looking for answers to lingering questions about the scarce frog, now known to inhabit only three areas of Washington state. Two are in Klickitat County in south-central Washington. The other encompasses less than 2,000 acres in the Black River watershed, southwest of Olympia.
What makes these frogs so rare?
"That's the million-dollar question," McAllister said. "What limits them?"
His best guess is the frog's apparent preference for shallow, swampy areas, the kind most easily drained and filled for development.
Other experts suspect habitat encroachment by bullfrogs, which are native to the eastern United States but have spread throughout the West.
"There's a negative correlation between where you find bullfrogs and spotted frogs," said Michael Blouin, a population geneticist who teaches in Oregon State University's Zoology Department.
"For whatever reason, bullfrogs haven't gotten to be really numerous in the Black River watershed," McAllister said.
Historically, Oregon spotted frogs ranged from British Columbia, through the Puget Sound region and south to Oregon's Willamette Valley, where they are now extinct.
In 1990, naturalist Bill Leonard, now an endangered species biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service, captured the first Oregon spotted frog found in the Puget Sound area since a sighting in Kent in 1957.
Leonard caught the frog after he and McAllister devoted about 1 1/2 years to a search for the frog they'd never seen alive.
"He thought I was just pulling his leg," said Leonard recalling his initial conversation with McAllister after the find.
At the time, Leonard worked for the state Department of Ecology. He picked up the frog during a routine wetland field trip. When he realized what it was, Leonard put it in the only available container -- his son's cast-off Star Wars lunch box -- and took it to McAllister's Olympia office. Leonard later returned the frog to the wild.
Since 1995, McAllister and a succession of colleagues have monitored the frog population along an unnamed creek that feeds into the Black River. It's about a quarter-mile from the spot where Leonard found the first frog and part of a 1,000-acre block of land owned by Port Blakely Tree Farms, a timber company. A dairy farmer leases the pasture.
Frog breeding time, in late February and March, finds McAllister here every year, slogging through clumps of rushes that clog the knee-deep swamp, his chest waders sagging at his hips. He looks for gelatinous masses of black-eyed eggs, pulls frogs out of wire traps, checks identification tags and marks those that lack them. He listens for the distinctive, quiet call of the male, similar to a woodpecker's distant tapping.
When frogs catch McAllister's eye, he grabs them. The interior face of his wristwatch is clouded with moisture, a reminder of frequent murky immersions.
McAllister's name will sound familiar to some. His ancestors were South Sound pioneers. McAllister Creek, which empties into the Nisqually River delta, bears their name.
McAllister, 45, has been fond of frogs since boyhood.
"I still have a vivid memory of digging up tree frogs that were hidden in rodent burrows by Eld Inlet," he said.
Those who know him say he's never lost his childhood sense of wonder. "We're all guys who caught frogs when we were kids, and everybody else grew up," Green joked.
Now there's no place McAllister would rather be in late winter than hunting frogs. In 1997, he began a population study that he hopes to carry on until 2006. Since starting research in the cow pasture, he has found satellite populations at three other locations, all within the Black River watershed.
Last year, he helped Nanette Seto, a wildlife biologist for the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, find the frogs within newly acquired refuge land along the Black River.
No one knows how many frogs live in the watershed, but McAllister estimates that between 800 and 1,000 inhabit the unnamed creek in the cow pasture.
Washington's Oregon spotted frog research has been supported by money from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Transportation, which plans to widen Interstate 5 through areas that may include frog habitat.
Still, he figures he spends at least two weeks a year tracking frogs on his own time, for fun.
He's now most interested in exploring the extent of the Oregon spotted frog within the Black River watershed.
"I'm thinking of putting a little boat in the water, floating down the river and listening for the males' (mating) call."
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