A little over a month ago, frog 120 suddenly fell off the grid together with his companion 110. We searched the whole of Sweetwater up and down, day and night, but the frogs seemed as swept off the face of the earth. The only sign of them ever being present was the steady beeping from 120's frequency out the...
Strange things seem to hapen in the forest after we leave. Not everything that happens in the frog community is understood by mankind, not even if you're part of the Mountain Chicken Team...
120 and 110 were two happy frogs that always used to hang out with each other. When 120 decided to hop down to the ghaut, 110 followed....
The crusaders
The last couple of weeks have run pretty smoothly in terms of the radio tracking, most of the frogs are staying close to ghaut and their last locations. There are only a couple for frogs that have challenged us to find them.
667 this individual, has gone up on the east bank of the ghaut, high up and likes...
A bit of local news. As part of their celebrations of Her Majesty The Queen's Diamond Jubilee the Earl and Countess of Essex visited Montserrat today. The schedule consisted of a visit to the Public Market, an opening of the new museum and a Steel Pan Celebration Concert performed by the local schools. Our little island shined and the...
One evening Blacka and I were heading off to one of the original survey sites looking for surviving mountain chickens. Fairy Walk is one of the sites that has been regularly monitored for mountain chickens since 1998, since well before the deadly chytrid fungus arrived on the Island.
We walk a route, a transect, which generally follows the ghaut. Between...
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Catching the mountain chickens to swab them is not as easy as it sounds; finding them for one, even with the radio transmitters it isn’t always a given that the frogs are moving more and further distances we have our work cut out for...
THE CULTURAL IMPORTANCE OF THE CRAPAUD TO THE COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA
Various species of animal wildlife have featured as important components in the cultural heritage of many countries all over the world. Some of these species are very iconic and have been elevated to the status of national emblems, flagship species, or have been included in the design of other...
As we have said before, in Montserrat we work hard and we play hard. To celebrate the successful release and all the hard work that has gone into bringing back the mountain chicken to Montserrat the team partied hard with a traditional evening of fire cooking and Caribbean calypso. Gerardo and Blacka were in charge of the fire (there...
We are all back into the forest to check on the newly released frogs, another big team effort. Gerardo and Javier were downloading data from the Songmeters, hoping for the recording of the mountain chickens calls, then checking out the ghaut visually for frogs. Blacka, Jenny, Ben and I were radio-tracking the frogs, our aim for tonight was to...
So the frogs are now safely in the forest. Now what? Well we need to find them of course. Some of you may remember this time last year with the last set of frogs when we started the radio-tracking. Basically all the frogs we have released this year are implanted with tiny transmitters which give out a signal. The...