The Bullfrog in Spring

I would make a chart of our life,

know why just this circle of creatures

 completes the world.

Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852

A bullfrog trumps once

after sunset on river –

warm summer-like night.  

May 23, 1856

Summer.
that season which is bounded on the north
on the spring side at least,

by the trump of the bullfrog.
May 10, 1858

April 17. To-day I see . . . a middling sized bullfrog, I think. April 17, 1855   

April 18. I suspect that all these frogs may be the R. fontinalis, and none of them bullfrogs . . . I doubt if I have seen a bullfrog yet. April 18, 1858

April 23. I see the large head apparently of a bullfrog, by the riverside. April 23, 1858

April 27. Apparently a small bullfrog by riverside, though it looks somewhat like a Rana fontinalis. April 27, 1856

May 1. 1 find many apparent young bullfrogs in the shaded pools on the Island Neck. Probably R. fontinalis. May 1, 1858 

May 2.  I doubt if I have heard any sound from a bullfrog in river yet. May 2, 1858

May 10.   I hear in several places the low dumping notes of awakened bullfrogs, what I call their pebbly notes, as if they were cracking pebbles in their mouths; not the plump dont dont or ker dont, but kerdle dont dont. As if they sat round mumbling pebbles. 

     At length, near Ball's Hill, I hear the first regular bullfrog's trump. Some fainter ones far off are very like the looing of cows. This sound, heard low and far off over meadows when the warmer hours have come, grandly inaugurates the summer. I perspire with rowing in my thick coat and wish I had worn a thin one. This trumpeter, marching or leaping in the van of advancing summer, whom I now hear coming on over the green meadows, seems to say, “Take off your coat, take off your coat, take off your coat!” He says, “Here comes a gale that I can breathe. This is some thing like; this is what I call summer.”

    I see three or four of them sitting silent in one warm meadow bay. Evidently their breeding-season now begins. But they are soon silent as yet, and it is only an occasional and transient trump that you hear. 

That season which is bounded on the north, on the spring side at least, by the trump of the bullfrog. This note is like the first colored petals within the calyx of a flower. It conducts us toward the germ of the flower summer. He knows no winter. I hear in his tone the rumors of summer heats. By this note he reassures the season. Not till the air is of that quality that it can support this sound does he emit it. It requires a certain sonorousness. 

    The van is led by the croaking wood frog and the little peeping hylodes, and at last comes this pursy trumpeter, the air growing more and more genial, and even sultry, as well as sonorous. As soon as Nature is ready for him to play his part, she awakens him with a warmer, perchance a sultry, breath and excites him to sound his trombone. It reminds me at once of tepid waters and of bathing. His trump is to the ear what the yellow lily or spatter-dock is to the eye. He swears by the powers of mud. 

    It is enough for the day to have heard only the first half-trump of an early awakened one from far in some warm meadow bay. It is a certain revelation and anticipation of the livelong summer to come. It gives leave to the corn to grow and to the heavens to thunder and lighten. It gives leave to the invalid to take the air. Our climate is now as tropical as any. It says, Put out your fires and sit in the fire which the sun has kindled. I hear from some far meadow bay, across the Great Meadows, the half-sounded trump of a bullfrog this warm morning. 

    It is like the tap of a drum when human legions are mustering. It reminds me that summer is now in earnest mustering her forces, and that ere long I shall see their waving plumes and glancing armor and hear the full bands and steady tread. The bullfrog is earth's trumpeter, at the head of the terrene band. He replies to the sky with answering thunder. May 10, 1858

May 23. After sunset on river. A warm summer-like night. A bullfrog trumps once. A large devil’s-needle goes by. May 23, 1856

May 25. I hear the first troonk of a bullfrog. May 25, 1852

May 25.  Heard the first regular bullfrog’s trump on the 18th; none since. May 25, 1855

June 1. The hylodes are no longer heard. The bullfrogs begin to trump.  June 1, 1853

June 4.  The bullfrog now begins to be heard at night regularly; has taken the place of the hylodes. June 4, 1853

June 6. From time to time, at mid-afternoon, is heard the trump of a bullfrog, like a Triton's horn. June 6, 1854

June 7.  Bullfrogs now are in full blast. I do not hear other frogs; their notes are probably drowned. I perceive that this generally is the rhythm of the bullfrog; er|er-r er-r-r| (growing fuller and fuller and more tremendous) and then doubling, er, er er, err er, er, er er, er, er and finally er, er, er, er er, er, er, er. Or I might write it oorar oorar oorar oorar-hah oorar-hah hah oorar hah hah hah.

    Some of these great males are yellow or quite yellowish over the whole back. Are not the females oftenest white-throated? . . . 

    Seeing a large head, with its prominent eyes, projecting above the middle of the river, I found it was a bullfrog coming across. It swam under water a  rod or two, and then came up to see where it was, or its way. It is thus they cross when sounds or sights attract them to more desirable shores. Probably they prefer the night for such excursions, for fear of large pickerel, etc.  I thought its throat was not yellow nor baggy. Was it not the female attracted by the note of the male? June 7, 1858

June 8. At the last small pond near Well Meadow, a frog, apparently a small bullfrog, on the shore enveloped by a swarm of small, almost invisible insects, some resting on him, attracted perhaps by the slime which shone on him. He appears to endure the persecution like a philosopher. June 8, 1853 

June 8. I perceive distinctly to-day that there is no articular line along the sides of the back of the bullfrog, but that there is one along the back of that bullfrog-like, smaller, widely dispersed and early frog. June 8, 1858 

June 9. So there is an evening for the toads and another for the bullfrogs.  June 9, 1853

June 13. The different frogs mark the seasons pretty well,- the peeping hyla, the dreaming frog, and the bullfrog . I believe that all may be heard at last occasionally together. The bullfrog belongs to summer. June 13, 1851

June 15. The bullfrogs now commonly trump at night, and the mosquitoes are now really troublesome. For some time I have not heard toads by day, and the hylodes appear to have done. . . . A new season begun. June 15, 1860

June 16.  It appears to me that these phenomena occur simultaneously, say June 12th: viz.: -

• Heat about. 85° at 2 P.M.

• Hylodes cease to peep.

• Purring frogs (Rana palustris) cease.

• Lightning-bugs first seen.

• Bullfrogs trump generally.

• Mosquitoes begin to be really troublesome.

• Afternoon thunder-showers almost regular.

• Sleep with open window.

• Turtles fairly and generally begun to lay.

June 16, 1860

June 20. Lying with my window open, these warm, even sultry nights, I hear the sonorously musical trump of the bullfrogs from time to time, from some distant shore of the river, as if the world were given up to them. By those villagers who live on the street they are never seen and rarely heard by day, but in the quiet sultry nights their notes ring from one end of the town to another. It is as if you had waked up in the infernal regions. I do not know for a time in what world I am. It affects my morals, and all questions take a new aspect from this sound.

At night bullfrogs lie on the pads and answer to one another all over North America; undoubtedly there is an incessant and uninterrupted chain of sound, troomp, troomp, troomp, from the Atlantic to the Pacific (vide if they reach so far west), further than Britain's morning gun. It is the snoring music of nature at night. When you wake thus at midnight and hear this sonorous trump from far in the horizon, you need not go to Dante for an idea of the infernal regions. It requires the night air, this sound.

How allied to a pad in place, in color, --for his greenish back is the leaf and his yellow throat the flower, in form, with his sesquipedality of belly! (And other, white-bellied frogs are white lilies. Through the summer he lies on the pads, or with his head out, and in the winter buries himself at their roots (?).The bull paddock! His eyes like the buds of the Nuphar Kalmiana. Methinks his skin would stand water without shrinking forever. Gloves made of it for rainy weather, for trout-fishers !

Frogs appear slow to make up their minds, but then they act precipitately. As long as they are here, they are here, and express no intention of removing; but the idea of removing fills them instantaneously, as nature, abhorring, fills a vacuum. Now they are fixed and imperturbable like the Sphinx, and now they go off with short, squatty leaps over the spatter-dock, on the irruption of the least idea.  June 20, 1852

June 20  The bullfrogs begin about 8.30. They lie at their length on the surface amid the pads. I touched one’s nose with my finger, and he only gave a sudden froggish belch and moved a foot or two off. How hard to imitate their note exactly, — its sonorousness. Here, close by, it is like er er ough, er er er ough, with a sonorous trump which these letters do not suggest.  June 20, 1853

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Bullfrog in Spring

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2026

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