Rare frog may be living in Camp Polk Meadow

The Oregon Public Broadcasting show Oregon Field Guide (OFG) explores the wide variety of flora and fauna across Oregon - and it usually offers something that piques the interest of local naturalists.

That's what happened when Al St. John of Bend, Oregon's best-known herpetologist (one who studies reptiles and amphibians), was watching a recent OFG segment about the Deschutes Land Trust's work in Camp Polk Meadow. He spotted a tiny glimpse of a frog.

"Whoa," he muttered, "...that looks like an Oregon Spotted Frog..." That one split-second look started a ball rolling that is still bouncing along on its way back to Camp Polk Meadow. First, St. John made a call to Amanda Egertson, land steward with DLT, the person spearheading the reclamation work on the meadow. The plan is to place Whychus Creek back into the meadow where it belongs, to restore salmon habitat.

Back in the 1960s the creek was "channelized," a project that turned it into a fire hose and ran it out of town as quickly as possible, because the creek had done some serious flooding around Sisters. However, channelizing the creek ruined any salmon habitat it may have once retained after being diverted for irrigation since the late 1800s.

Egertson didn't know any details regarding the location and filming of the supposed spotted frog, but she knew who to ask. She made call to Ed Jahn, director for the OFG program, in hopes of putting St. John on the right track. Jahn went back into his files and talked to his film crew, and they in turn looked into their files and were able to pin-point the actual location of that segment of film.

Jahn e-mailed Egertson back: "That frog WAS in fact seen on your property. It was the one we saw hopping around in the mud when you were "turning on the creek." "Turning on the creek" was the moment when the creek was brought back into the old meanders through a small pipeline, to slowly introduce the moisture to the meadow, so as to not wash away the soils.

St. John thought that was peculiar, as spotted frogs are known to dig into the muddy bottom of a pond to spend their idle hours.

These developments put Jay Bowerman into the loop. Bowerman, who heads up the Sunriver Nature Center, is currently doing research on the spotted frogs at Sunriver and near La Pine. He told his frog-research assistant, Ross Hindererer, a graduate of Ohio Northern University, about the possible Camp Polk Frog, who in turn told Chris Pearl, frog researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey at Oregon State University about it.

All this interest in the spotted frog is because it's a beautiful part of Oregon's landscape, its rarity, and it's a possible candidate for the Endangered Species list of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. As it is, the little frog is already on the Oregon and Washington list of "Species of Concern."

Amphibians are taking a licking these days, a trend that is of great concern

to biologists worldwide. Frogs and toads are "indicators" of environmental health, therefore, when something happens to disturb their presence, it may be something that could affect all life on the planet.

Spotted frogs - which, by the way, call both above and below the surface of ponds in springtime - have never been reported in the Camp Polk Meadow vicinity. This may be an example of how ecosystems of Central Oregon begin to heal through the reclamation efforts of such organizations as the Deschutes Land Trust.