Frog Discovery May Jump-Start Shift in Attitude

The discovery of three threatened California red-legged frogs in a rancher’s stock pond in western Calaveras County in the fall has triggered a new effort to convince the state’s ranchers that the amphibians are important to their long-term economic survival.

When the rancher’s children stumbled upon the frogs -- a male and two females -- while playing around a water hole in October, the family’s decision to report the find to the Murphys-based Jumping Frog Research Institute was of historic importance.

According to Robert Stack, who founded the institute in 1996, it was the first documented sighting of red-legged frogs in Calaveras County in almost 35 years.

The frog, the largest native amphibian west of the Rocky Mountains, was once common throughout California, Baja California and other parts of Mexico.

During the 20th century, because of the loss of habitat to development, pollution, reservoirs, water diversion and agricultural operations, red-legged frogs disappeared from 70% of their former range, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In addition, the introduction of nonnative predators, such as the Eastern bullfrog and sunfish in ponds and lakes, decimated red-legged frogs in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Stack said. Today, the remaining populations are clustered in the state’s coastal mountains.

Historians and scientists generally agree that it was a red-legged frog named Dan’l Webster that Mark Twain referred to in his classic Gold Rush tale “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

As the author put it: “Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been everywheres all said he laid over any frog that they ever see.”

It is quite possible, Stack joked, that the three frogs found in October not far from the town of Angels Camp are direct descendants of Dan’l Webster.

When Twain first heard the story of Smiley’s champion jumper in 1865, the largest native frogs in Angels Camp almost certainly had red legs, according to those who study them. Bullfrogs weren’t introduced to California until the 1890s.

Now, Stack, along with Eric Thomas, a professor of biology at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, is leading an initiative to create a captive breeding program in the Sierra foothills that would start with the frogs found in Calaveras County.

But their goal is more than to raise frogs. They hope to fundamentally shift ranchers’ and farmers’ historic hostility toward recovery programs for endangered or threatened species. The pair envision a day when farmers and ranchers will clamor to join such programs because the recovery efforts will help ensure their long-term economic survival on the land.

Stack and Thomas have also enlisted several government entities -- including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the state Department of Fish and Game, and the county -- to help establish a system that rewards ranchers and farmers for protecting threatened and endangered species while enhancing the environment. The goal would be to eventually remove them from protections under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Farmers and ranchers have for decades intensely disliked such laws, fearing that the discovery of listed species -- the red-legged frog or the California tiger salamander, for example -- on their land could cost them dearly.

“If you are a landowner or a rancher, and one of your cows steps on a frog and kills it, there is a fear that you could be prosecuted or jailed for it,” Thomas said, adding that such concerns are exaggerated.

But that hasn’t stopped opponents of the Endangered Species Act and similar laws from warning growers and ranchers of dire consequences should they report the presence of rare or protected wildlife on their land, he said.

The discovery of the three red-legged frogs in the county in which Twain’s story is set provides a historic opportunity to change all that, Stack argued.

“I wish it weren’t true that some endangered or threatened species are more important than others, but they are,” he said. The red-legged frog “is right up there with the bald eagle and the California condor” because of Twain’s story and the public’s love affair with frogs, promoted each year during the frog-jumping competition at the Calaveras County Fair, he said.

California Cattlemen’s Assn. officials expressed cautious support for programs designed to reintroduce such wildlife as the frog.

“We feel that it’s very important that each rancher have the opportunity to make the decision” himself on whether to get involved in such programs, said Noel Cremers, the association’s director of industry affairs. “We feel some ranchers will be excited and some won’t want to deal with the burdens.”

In the foothills, red-legged frog habitat is generally below the 3,500-foot level, Stack said. Thus, virtually all the land on which the amphibians once thrived is in private hands, usually home to cattle or other livestock operations. So protecting and enhancing the environment for frogs and other endangered species is almost entirely up to individual landowners, he said.

Changing hostile attitudes depends largely on what happens to the tiny Calaveras colony of red-legged frogs and the rancher who reported the discovery, Thomas and Stack said.

The two scientists and governmental entities that are involved have been careful to keep the identity of the family and the location of the ranch secret to protect their privacy and to prevent curious outsiders from trespassing and perhaps jeopardizing the frogs’ survival.

If the rancher, by disclosing the discovery, benefits economically from steps taken to establish a breeding population and gets financial support to enhance his acreage for the frogs and cattle, other ranchers may be willing to take similar steps, said Jim Nickels, a spokesman in Sacramento for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We really want to work with them in a partnership, so they can keep their cattle operations going and build trust in the [ranching] community,” he said. “We have suspected for a long time that there were populations of red-legged frogs up there.”

His agency “really has an interest in keeping ranching viable,” he said. “If the ranch becomes a subdivision, then everybody loses.”