We drove to the the starting point of the road in Loubomo today, and they kept going to the river crossing to Mayumba where the government is building a huge bridge.  It is impressive, the new President is doing a lot for the country.  We left at 8am and we’re back at 2pm so it wasn’t that far for a round trip.  It was good to see the changing landscape, where we are in the study area is a flat savanna area with patches of swamps and forests. Once we got on the other side of the Boume Boume river the landscape changed to huge rolling hills and then forest.  Cell service became standard and there were villages all along the road.

We have a ton of frogs for the studio work today, and I am so exhausted from the night before.  I spent all day photographing the frogs, it’s helpful when there is enough to focus a whole day on the studio work, I noticed that with the fish too.  You can get into a good rhythm, plus the rechargeable batteries work better right after a charge so that helps too.

I’ve noticed the personalities of the animals matter a lot with the studio work.  Some frogs go nuts, some are calm, and some get aggressive.  There’s one type of frog that decides to go after you when your photographing it.  I noticed in the forest, it was the one species that instead of running, it turned around and started moving towards me, it did the same in the studio; rather ballsy for a little guy.

The two stars are the turtle frog and a red toed frog that makes me think of red lipstick for some reason.  The turtle frog is funny, he started to burrow into my hand as soon as I grabbed him.  Not to mention how funny he looks!

The bouncy frogs are the hardest, as soon as you let them out of your hand they start jumping around.  I added black velvet to a cardboard box that I duct taped up to contain the frogs when I photographed them, and it helped a lot, otherwise they would immediately hop away.  Thanks to Joel Sartore for that one, I learned it from watching him.

Tonight was my first night walk with the amphibian team.

During the day we set up the transect, checked it for frogs – not many – and then went to the Boume Boume river to get clean water for camp.

We set up another pitfall trap today in a forested part of the savanna which has water in the rainy season, but when we were there, most of it had dried up. There were lots of signs of hippos, which has become pretty common, and tons of little frogs. I can see one problem they will have with the road they want to put in, and that is hippos crossing at night.

The young frogs are interesting, they all have different patterns in their attempts to mimic the leaves so they do not get gobbled up.  Oh and the first spot we checked for the traps had a huge black snake that zipped up a tree with no problem, so we moved on!

Today I felt bad for the frogs, which started a day earlier. The specimens that are collected are going to end up in a museum, in the U.S. and Gabon, which means they have to die. Yesterday, when photographing some tree frogs I felt sorry for them.  It wasn’t that intense, but my brain began to wrap itself around the fact that this frog that I am photographing is going to die.

Today it hit me more, oddly enough with a big fat toad.  It wasn’t elegant, or handsome, but it was huge and fat, I guess to me, the epitome of a toad.  I think a good comparison to it would be deer with huge antlers: some people want to put their heads on the wall to showcase them, and others are happy to see them in the wild and that is it.  Nature should be proud of this toad, and I know it is for science, but it is still a bummer that such a fine specimen has to end up in a museum.  At the same time, you could say it is an ambassador for its species, so that perspective helps me be a little less dreary.