Northern Cricket Frog

The name comes from the call. The male’s advertisement call is a hard, dry, clicking sound often written as ‘gick gick gick’, made by snapping the vocal folds, and it is usually described as sounding exactly like two small stones, marbles, or pebbles being tapped together. The clicks start slowly, then speed up into a rapid rattle before stopping, and dozens or hundreds of males calling from a pond edge on a warm evening blend into a continuous chirping racket that sounds remarkably like a meadow full of crickets. The frog itself is roughly cricket-sized too.

Extremely far for its size. A frog only two or three centimetres long can cover 90 centimetres or more in a single leap, which is over 30 times its body length, and some measured jumps approach 60 times body length. It does not just jump once, either — when startled it fires off a rapid series of long hops in unpredictable directions, zig-zagging away from the threat. This makes a cricket frog genuinely difficult to catch by hand, and it is the frog’s main defence, since it has no toxins and is small and edible.

When a cricket frog at the edge of a pond is alarmed, it often does not dive in and swim down, which would take it toward fish, turtles, and predatory insects. Instead it launches out over the open water in a series of long, low, flat jumps, each one skimming the surface and pushing off again before the frog sinks, so it ‘skitters’ several body lengths across the water and then either reaches the far bank or dives once it is well clear of the shore. It is not walking on water like a basilisk lizard; it is making repeated shallow jumps off the surface film.

This is an active area of concern and research. In states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia, the northern cricket frog was historically abundant and is now rare, state-listed as threatened or endangered, or gone from large areas, even though it remains common further south. No single cause has been pinned down. Suspects include the loss and degradation of the shallow, sunlit, fish-free pond edges it needs, agricultural pesticide and fertiliser runoff, the amphibian chytrid fungus, harsh winters at the edge of its cold tolerance (the frogs do not burrow deep and many die overwinter), and habitat fragmentation isolating populations. It is likely a combination hitting a species that is naturally short-lived and living at its climatic limit.