Date: 27th October 2012
Time: 8 - 10pm
Temp: 16°C
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Rainfall: <50mm
Firstly, sorry for taking so long to get this posted, especially to John Clare.
On the 27th October 2012 we had a day of nice heavy rainfall that came down non-stop for a few hours. I have now learnt that when we have this kind of Highveld rainfall (usually <50mm) there will be lots of flooding and lots of Bull Frogs. Just to clear this up from the start these are Pyxicephalus adspersus, the Giant Bullfrog. So at around 8 o'clock in the evening I got in my car and faced some serious winds (which blew a sign board across the road and dented my number plate and bumper). I took a route which I will not disclose in a public forum, I drove about 30km on this trip and came across well over 20 Bull Frogs ranging from 9cm in size and the largest one I saw was well over 20cm. Unfortunately this road that I took was a very busy road, and many of these frogs were killed on the roads.
I take these trips specifically to catch and release in safer areas and off of main roads. Not all the frogs can be saved as it is quite dangerous to pull your car over in rainy weather (specially because there are no street lights on this stretch) and then run across the road trying to catch a disgruntled frog who just want to get to the breeding holes.
So these were two that I brought home to release in a pan close to my house, both as you can see in the first pic and second pic, measured in at around 10-11cm
The next day I released at the pan near my house, these are a few pics of what a general breeding pan will look like:
As you can see in these 2 pics the soil is very hard and grassy with different kinds of veld (field) grasses, this helps the water gather and develop water pans.
But when the rainy season starts you need gum boots to get around these pans.
I came across these tadpoles in the pans. At first I thought they were Bull Frog tadpoles, I still am not sure. They probably are one of our indigenous toad species but the way the tadpoles were behaving threw me off - usually tadpoles from our toads gather in a large ball and are in very deep waters, these were in shallow waters. Some clarity would be helpful.
And one final pic, I came across thise little guy sitting on the side of the road a few weeks back on the way to the local convenience store at around 8pm at night.
Hope you find these pictures interesting and feel free to ask me any questions except the locations of where I found the frogs.
Also please note all frogs have been released safely and hopefully will breed in the wild next season in a safer area.
Darryn Rogers