![]() It’s color most likely due to the color of the wood it’s resting on. This rather brown individual was photographed in August. This frog is dark due to the cold temperatures of mid-March. Green tree frogs can and do change their color.Ī very light, almost yellow green tree frog. Most frogs are darker when the ambient temps are low. Those color variations are due to the individual’s temperature, the color of the object it happens to be perched upon at the time, or mood. I’ve seen green tree frogs that were nearly yellow, leaf green, dark or forest green, olive-green and chocolate-brown. Having established the species, I wondered why this frog was blue and not green (or teal, as some have suggested). What else could it be? It had to be a green tree frog ( Hyla cinerea). The frog had the characteristic light stripe on its side. I was certain there weren’t any wild “blue” tree frogs in our area, the North Carolina Piedmont. However, other than a few poison dart frogs of Central and South America I knew there weren’t any, or many, blue colored frogs anywhere in the world. Being the object of many a predator’s attentions, frogs need to match their surrounds. There’s always the possibility of an introduced species or an escapee from someone’s collection finding their way into the local fauna. But, it was blue, not green.Īt first glance, I wasn’t sure it was a green tree frog. They blend in well on the smartweed, having green skin, even so far as having a light stripe down their sides to match the center vein of the smartweed leaf. I’d been seeing one in this very location almost daily for the past couple of months perched on either a leaf or stem of one of the plants. It was on one such typical day in October (10/8) that I happened to be standing at the end of the boardwalk staring down at the smartweed looking for green tree frogs. ![]() Typically, there are pollinators visiting the flowers on the smartweed, perhaps a smartweed caterpillar munching on the leaves, a meadow katydid or two, snakes and bullfrogs trying to either find or avoid one another and, well, you never know what you may find by leaning over the rail at this point on our 700′ boardwalk, no matter what time of year it is. One of those locations is the patch of smartweed at the end of the boardwalk in Explore the Wild. That said, there are certain locations I can’t pass without stopping and making a thorough scan. As a naturalist, I keep a watchful eye to the sky, ground, and all around as I make my way through Explore the Wild, Catch the Wind, and the Dinosaur Trail during my daily routine here at the Museum.
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