The night the ‘crirpling’ started

Press, 20 January 1984, Page 14

The night the ‘crirpling’ started

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

Back in the swinging sixties, when we were newly married, living in a rented house, and not too worried about the cares of the world and the conservation of nature, a couple of friends visted us at the end of a West Coast holiday. “We’re off down south,” they said. “Please look after our fish.” And they dumped on the bench a water-filled plastic bag containing half a dozen enfeebled galaxias. “Oh, and here’s a special present for yon. We’re off — see you in a week.” Actually, it was a fortnight before they showed up again, and by then the torrent fish were all dead, though we had done what we could

for them, nursing them along in a tub of water under a constantly dripping tap in the hope of reviving them sufficiently to liberate them again in a stream somewhere. The gift was another matter. At first it baffled us — a glass jar, crammed with damp spaghnum moss and gauze covered. When I parted the moss , two wet, brown shapes emerged. “Holy blank,” I said. “What are they?”

“Those,” said our friends when they returned, “are whistling tree frogs. They’ll sing all night for you.” They never did, and thereby hangs a tale. What do you do with a pair of tree frogs in a suburban house where there are two hunting cats ready to pounce on anything that moves? And how can you keep two bush creatures alive and happy in a glass jar?

The solution to both problems came in a flash: liberate them. On the south side of the house, where the sticky Ham soil, constantly shaded, remained cool and damp year round, the original owner, who had been a noted horticulturist, had planted a little “patch” of bush: a lancewood, by then mature

and towering above the house, flax, astelias, hebes, and a peppertree. That evening I crawled into the middle of the thicket and shook the frogs out of their glass jar into the undergrowth.

Weeks, months, went by, and not a peep from the frogs. Then one humid autumn night, when the windows were wide open for comfort and Bartok’s unaccompanied violin sonata was on the stereo, the crirpling started. Crirpling as I call it, is somewhere between, or all three of, a chirp, a croak, and a whistle. It’s a sound that anyone who has spent a night in the Westland bush knows well.

In the bush it goes on all night, but in suburban Christchurch, when the music stopped, the crirpling stopped. Whether the humid weather or the curious strains of Bartok’s music triggered it, I will never know. What I do know is that it was repeated, numerous times, and always on mild moist nights when Bartok’s violin sonata was on the stereo.

Soon afterwards we moved to a larger house on the other side of the city, taking the cats and the stereo with us. We never found out

how long the tree fogs survived. The new occupants of our old house didn’t look the sort who would listen to Bartok.

Later, while fishing in the Ashley River, I heard the distinctive sound again. A 17st friend and myself used to go to the Ashley bridge, with my little car sagging leftwards under his weight (but I was glad of it the night the car bogged down in sand and he pushed it out, single-handed), and take a rough track that wound down to the estuary along the north bank of the river.

There, beside a narrow gut which appeared at low tide, we would stand in the starlight at the turning tide and flick big silvery wet flies into the river — imitation whitebait. It was a technique guaranteed to produce a bag of fat, juicy sea-trout and, wonder of wonders, we never had to share the spot with other fishermen. Sometimes, when the night was balmy and the wind in the right quarter, the crirpling of tree frogs drifted across from the swamps upriver.

This was 15 or 16 years ago; I haven’t been back, though from

time to time I wondered why the lower Ashley area should be the only place in Canterbury with a resident population of tree frogs. But I hadn’t thought about'them for years, until my memory was jogged recently by a “Press” random reminder.

I still haven’t resolved the fate of the Bartok-loving Ham frogs, but I do now know, thanks to a note from a North Canterbury reader, how the Ashley frogs got there. They came from the West Coast — in bundles of flax railed to Rangiora and carted on solid-tyred trucks to the old Andrews Twine Works (now Donaghys Industries, Ltd) on the Main North Road at Waikuku, where they established themselves in the numerous swampy areas. In the 19505, says the reader, a bad flood carried them down to the Woodend area, and some became established on his farm, in a gully where water lay year round.. Unlike the couple in the random reminder, who couldn’t wait to dispose of their frog, this retired farmer so much enjoys listening to his whistling frogs that when drought threatened their habitat, A

he actually went out and bought a pool for them. He writes: “As most people are aware, frogs develop from tadpoles, and tadpoles need water to live in, so when over the last few very dry summers the gully dried out, there was a decline in the frog population as they had nowhere to breed. “So! What heppened then? Why they discovered our swimming pool and commandeered that. Fortunately for them my wife and I were very sympathetic to their needs, as we enjoyed hearing them singing in our patch of native bush, so we left them undisturbed for the rest of the summer. “Their development was watched with great interest by grandchildren and visitors alike. A great increase in the frog population was the result and what a beautiful frog chorus we had last winter. Eventually the time came when most of the young frogs had left our pool, so the question was how could we have our pool back without destroying the few remaining inhabitants? “Then one day on surveying the

‘For Sale’ column in “The Press” we saw a cheap 10ft x 2ft pool advertised. A quick phone call, off to town and back we came with a new home for. the frogs where they are now breeding undisturbed again this summer. “We have quite a laugh with our

friends over having a frogs’ swimming pool. There is now quite a large frog population around the property again and we still enjoy their singing at night or when there is a shower of rain during the day.” So there you have it. One man’s moan is another man’s frisson.