Yosemite National Park officials, students and other gathered last week in Cooks Meadow to release the California red legged frog, a species that has involved many entities and people in its drive for recovery. The setting could not have been better with Yosemite Falls in the background. Photos by Tom Lyden
Under a cerulean blue sky with Yosemite Falls in the background, school children gathered in Cooks Meadow last week to release 100 frogs into Yosemite Creek.
It was a “ribbiting” photo opportunity.
It was also a giant leap forward for this particular amphibian, the California red legged frog.
The event marked the 10,000th red legged frog released into Yosemite National Park in the last 10 years.
In the 1970s, the red legged frog was wiped out in Yosemite Valley by the invasive bull frog, which has since been eradicated.
Yosemite National Park Ranger Rob Grasso, an aquatic ecologist, said the red legged will occupy a niche left open when the bull frog was eradicated.
But even with the bull frog gone, the red legged frog will still have its predators, including the blue heron.
“It’s a stealthy bird that likes to fish and has patience, and is really good at what they do,” Grasso said.
The red legged frog is listed federally as a “threatened species” and has lost 70 percent of its historic habitat.
Shown is the California red legged frog, which was the subject of a special event at Yosemite.
The conservation project has relied in large part on Dianne Buchholz, who has allowed researchers to harvest frog eggs on her tree farm near Garden Valley in El Dorado County.
The frogs are then raised at the San Francisco Zoo until one or two years old.
The red legged frog’s comeback was led by the National Park Service in collaboration with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife, California Department of Fish & Wildlife, Yosemite Conservancy and the San Francisco Zoo & Gardens.
Grasso said ecologists would technically describe the project as a “conservation translocation,” when scientists take a native species and move it to an area outside of its known range, but an area that it historically occupied.
Grasso said their are references to the red legged frog that go back to John Muir, who had a cabin in Cooks Meadow.
But it was Mark Twain who put the red legged frog on the map with the short story in 1865 that launched his career, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
The 10,000th frog was nicknamed “Twain.”
School children release the 10,000th, California red legged frog into Yosemite Creek in Cooks Meadow on May 7. The frog is being reintroduced after it was wiped out by the bull frog.
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