Morning from South Africa

John requested that I submit these photos and explain a bit about the photos to give you guys some on sight info and also probably make you jealous

I live in Gauteng South Africa, on the highveld we have a large population of wild Bullfrogs and the area I live in Fourways is know for its bullfrogs. It is just unfortunate that there is so much development that is going on at the moment so a lot of the natural enviroment which these frogs thrive in is being destroyed. The last wild bullfrog i saw was walking across the parking lot of a nightclub/bar so just to give you an indication of how close we are to their territory. As you probably know bullfrogs enhabit perinial water pans like most of our highveld frogs. So when the water hole dries up they head underground and hibernate till the rainy season starts (usually around September). Thie last season it was my mission to go out and find several bullfrogs but unfortantly this did not happen, it was a slow herping season all around the country and I was only able to find a few frogs and managed to help relocate this big male bullfrog.


(©2009 Darryn Rogers - first published on www.FrogForum.net)

A friend of mine does snake removals and was phoned to remove a bullfrog from an office park's underground parking basement. apparantly the office park was built in winter and as soon as the rains came this guy came through the drainage system and was sitting in the middle of the parking lot. Its sad becasue that means that the office park destroyed his pan of water and any other's that were there were killed, so he was the lone survivor. The red snout is from rubbing his nose against the transport tub.

So we are fortunate enough to know of a guy who owns a game farm/piece of land allows us to relocate any herps we find in the Pretoria area to his place for a new lease on life. This is one big male as you can clearly see and measures in at around 27cm (sorry metric system), I have only ever seen two (including this one) this big, usually what i have seen is around 15cm.

So we relocated this guy into what would be the ideal enviroment, and these pics can give you some idea of what their natural enviroment looks like:


(©2009 Darryn Rogers - first published on www.FrogForum.net)



(©2009 Darryn Rogers - first published on www.FrogForum.net)

I am currently planning on doing some indipendant research into bullfrogs, I will be observing several different areas in and around Gauteng and will be looking at distrobution, paternal care, size, weight, and hopefully be able to observe mating. Please feel free to answer any questions that you may have, I am no expert in the field but I will do my best to answer.