Frog versus Snake at Huntley Meadows,Virginia

I recently read David Carroll's "Swampwalker's Journal" for an Audubon class.   The artwork alone

should commend the book to those who are serious naturalists.   In this book, the author presents the observations he has made year after year while mapping the wetlands near his New Hampshire home.

When I read the book, I was struck by the following passage in which  Carroll recounts poking a snake on the nose with his walking stick after hearing the plaintive cry of an oversized frog:

"Two eerie calls, silence, then two more calls. The pattern continues. The repeated drawn out cries sound like the downscaled bleatings of a lamb...they seem to express the epitome of distress....Of all the possibilities that went through my mind as I searched for the source of these wails, I never imagined a frog.. The snake has one of the frog’s hind legs in his mouth, and winding backward, is dragging him up the slope... The frog continues to cry out. The snake coils and on coils, flexing his belly plates resolutely seeking traction in soft, plush haircap moss... I am not given to interfering with nature, but I find myself unable to walk away from the scene.....My human perception that no good can come of this for prey or predator moves me to gently tap the garter snake with my walking stick. The tenacious young hunter lets go of the frog’s hind leg. He curls back into the sweetfern and is gone.

The wood frogs nerve jarring expressions of distress fell on literal and figurative deaf ears in the case of the young garter snake. His was truly a voice  crying out in the wilderness. ... Neither protest nor imploration would seem to have a place in the natural world, yet their embodied evocations can be sensed in such dramatic existential voicings as the wood frog’s distress call.   It is hard for human perception, with its own evolution of cries, to ignore such an expression, even from the nonhuman world. One could well wonder about the possibility of plea in protest, and how far back they might go in the history of living forms... No band of wood frogs rushed in here. None ever will. And yet, in the face of an unfathomable unhearing, life cries out at times."  (pp.9-11)

Carroll,David M.; Swampwalker’s Journal: a wetlands year.  Houghton-Mifflin. New York,  1999  (It is available in paperback and on various e-readers)

This afternoon, I was faced with the exact same scenario. While every fiber ached for the suffering frog, I also realized that this is a setting in which nature must take its course.   The garter snake has as much right to its existence as the frog.  Like Carroll, I could not walk away...but unlike Carroll, I did not feel I had a right to intervene (and the barrier of the wooden boardwalk made that impossible anyway).

In this case, however, the snake seemed to realize, it truly had bitten off more than it could chew, and gradually the frog's leg was released -- whether it will be functional after such an encounter???  Of that, I am unsure.   Here then, is a photographic account of what happened.

Note, in this first picture, the snake has been well camouflaged in the remnants of last year's cattail fibers.

Note the leg is beginning to be released in this next shot.

The snake actually has to turn its head to let the lower foot out.

At this point the poor frog is really on stretch and I keep wondering whether it was able to get away.

I did not find out -- because the snake arched up as the reeds rustled, thus, the action shifted deeper into the cattail roots.    Some mysteries perhaps are better left unsolved.

Like Annie Dillard when she watched the frog become lifeless when a giant waterbug attacked it, I was stunned as this drama unfolded - but the naturalist within held firm to observe.  The compassionate part of the self hopes and prays for both frog and snake this evening...in their quest for survival.