Pickerel frogs

[e.g. g]

I have never (knowingly) seen a pickerel frog. Are they around in this area? Localities to make a note of, to keep an ear or eye open?
Elizabeth G
Scotch Point

[rmb...@istar.ca]

Are you on iNaturalist? I think you can look at the sightings without
having signed up. At any rate, put pickerel frog in the search column
and it will show all the sightings, and you can narrow the search to
your area.

I certainly have them here on my property north of Perth Road Village.

Rose-Marie

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[e.g. g]

iNaturalist shows eastern Ontario observations all on granite Shield. But elsewhere in Ontario, they’re found on non-Shield limestone/dolostone viz. Niagara Escarpment and westward, a pair of outliers in the non-Shield wooded maple hills west of Orillia.

What gives?
Any ideas, all?
Elizabeth G

> On Jul 17, 2026, at 10:12 AM, rmb...@istar.ca wrote:
>
> Are you on iNaturalist? I think you can look at the sightings without having signed up. At any rate, put pickerel frog in the search column and it will show all the sightings, and you can narrow the search to your area.

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/naturelist/20260717101239.27444rg8udilhj6f%40webmail.ca.inter.net.

[Tana McDaniel]

I used to do field work on pickerel frogs and there were certainly many in the Lake Opinicon and Chaffeys Lock area.

 Although that was many decades ago i see there are indeed iNaturalist sightings around Chaffeys  Lock area. 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/naturelist/20260717101239.27444rg8udilhj6f%40webmail.ca.inter.net.

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 7/17/2026 10:12 AM, rmb...@istar.ca wrote:

> I certainly have them here on my property north of Perth Road Village.

* there's a PhD here in the way Leopard & Pickerel Frogs trade off
landscapes, so that while in some places they are both common, in others
one species is common and the other is vanishingly rare. We have never
had a Pickerel here in the greater Bishops Mills area, but found 1 on
the road at the Long Swamp north of Brockville in 1981, and another at
Mud Creek SW of North Augusta around 2022.

As I was growing up in Connecticut the Scientific American articles were
full of Rana pipens as "The Frog" (they were hugely used in physiology
experiments back then), but I never saw anything but Pickerels until I
collected a sample of Leopards near my aunt's place for my thesis, and
was subsequently told that these were the first certainly wild-caught
specimens for the entire State.

When we were doing the outer Bruce Peninsula there were a couple of
records of individual Pickerels, and then in 1992 someone did a wetland
evaluation of a bog in the township south of the area we were working,
and found a population of Pickerels, so the ones we'd learned of in the
north had dispersed 20 or more km - and this became our model for the
uncommon species in this dyad: isolated populations that send dispersing
juveniles many km across the landscape.

There are similar patterns of rarity/abundance in Quebec and New
Brunswick - I don't know about Nova Scotia. In his masters thesis
Francis Cook doubted a 19th Century record of a Pickerel from PEI as
probably just a brown Leopard, but around 2000 a population of Pickerels
was found in a wetland there.

...so it's important to attend to the details of every spotted frog -
but they are my thesis species, so I may be biased.

fred.
------------------------------------------

> Quoting "'e.g. g' via NatureList" <natur...@googlegroups.com>:
>
>> I have never (knowingly) seen a pickerel frog.  Are they around in
>> this area?  Localities to make a note of, to keep an ear or eye open?
>> Elizabeth G
>> Scotch Point
--

------------------------------------------------------------
---------Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad ------------
Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
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