Intrepid Amphibian Monitors: Your team’s mission if you choose to accept it is to find a creative way to share about your monitoring season (for example: your findings, your site, the fun you’re having while monitoring). It could be a haiku, an infographic, a song, a video…your choice! I’ll have some impartial judges choose three winning entries, with those teams receiving fabulous prizes (including zoo passes!) and the chance to have your work featured on the zoo’s blog and social media channels. DEADLINE: May 15th! Please let me know if you have any questions!

Hello Amphibian Monitors! Please join me in celebrating the Bellevue Master Naturalists, who won our Team Engagement contest with the following lovely poem:

Froggie Love
March 2017:

Even in this cold and beastly winter
The amphibians take time for froggie love
Leaving jellied eggs below the surface
Of a pond that sedges poke above.

Clouds are partly lifting, so the humans
Risking brisky air and pending pour,
Wearing clunky boots and draped in cameras,
Gently wade in shallows at the shore.

Peering at the surface clear or murky
Slipping plastic sheet a tad beneath
They examine, they explore and part the waters
Checking under stalks and fallen leaf.

“I think I found one!” Much elated, shows the others
Cloudy purse with round black eggs, count five or six
Well-adhering to the stalk of old emergent
“Must be chorus frog,” they murmur, “Take a pic.”

The volunteer with camera snaps a photo,
Calls out the hue of eggs, the size of mass
And on the shore, the data are recorded,
With date and time and waypoint GPS.

Which organism is the more triumphant
Is it salamander, frog or newt
Whose reproductive talent has been proven?
Or the nature-hounds in data’s hot pursuit?

Submitted by Bellevue Master Naturalists