Jeepers, Peepers

The Vernal Pool Next Door

It is late afternoon and spring by the calendar, although still quite cool.  I have just spent some time at our neighbor’s pond, listening to a form of music that some have likened to the sound to bells.  Others liken it to bird song. And still others with unimaginable disdain, to “some kind of nature noise.”  For me it is one of the happiest of sounds– the act of creation transformed into sound decibels for all to hear.  A sound that comes from the earth and resounds to the heavens, unwittingly praising the Almighty.   It is a form of ecstasy when the sound surrounds me totally, filling my ears every evening with perhaps the single-most highlight of spring for me– the siren song of the Spring Peepers.

How have they cast their spell over so many?   I cannot say except that their song is uplifting and filled with hope despite the natural perils they face daily.  For, as true of all of us, they may die at any moment– say as a meal for a nearby perching crow or underneath murky waters eaten by a snapping turtle.  They call for a mate without ceasing, without fear, single-mindedly, without a thought for their own safety.  This is nature at her most elemental, in her most singular scope.  The peepers all sing out vying to be heard– an a cappella choir of voices.  In some spots, I am told, their song is deafening.  How nice to be there; I cannot get enough of their sweet music.  It moves me to tears– these tiny creatures singing out their heart’s desire.

As I return home to family “situations” and domestic duties, I yearn for the simplicity and total fervor of their song.  For if they sing then all is “right” in at least that small part of the world.  Progress has not paved over their pond.  Disdainful humans have not drained a “vernal pool.”  David M. Carroll writes about vernal pools in his books on turtles called The Swampwalker’s Journal.  As the title suggests, Carroll walks such places in search of turtles and other amphibians.  He defines a vernal pool as a pool of water that fills up in Fall and Winter, swells in the Spring and often dries up by end of Summer.  But a vernal pool is utmost a place of magic, not only where turtles lurk, but where mating frogs deposit gelatinous eggs which turn into tadpoles first, and there, later become frogs.  And after a requisite series of warm days, followed by spring rains, on the first dark night, vernal pools become the site of the “salamander night.”  Salamanders leave their hibernacula to go for a night of endless mating and then return to leaf litter in the woods to disappear for the rest of the year.  Some people who know nothing of vernal pools and their function deem them a nuisance, a big puddle to be filled in or drained.  Some people know little of spring peepers except that they are “noisy,” “like some sort of insect.”  Poor insects are made out to be the pesky lowest of the low. The natural symphony of hormonal, harmonic sounds sometimes falls on deaf ears.

After finishing my evening chores, I try reading, but find the haunting sound of the spring peepers digging deep within my psyche, making me restless, wishing to be part of that pond, surrounded on all sides by the sex song, inebriated with the unbridled joy in the air, submerged in the utter power of nature manifesting in one of her gentler forms.  For the song of the Spring Peepers nature celebrates life-to-be rather than the taking-away of life.  Most of all, the song of the Spring Peepers is a song of tremendous faith, faith in love, faith that love will propagate, and faith that new life will emerge.