This year was a hard year with no rains coming for 8 weeks during the months of April and May. Virtually the entire peach crop of Georgia was lost due to drought drop, and the rabbits in my yard ate zinnias and other plants they normally left alone.
This meant that most tree frogs in my neighborhood would not have a place to lay eggs and that my breeding tanks would be critical for that population.
This put a tremendous amount of pressure on me because last year when I set the tanks up, they were monopolized by Green Frogs (Lithobates clamitans), which eat the small Cope’s Gray Tree Frog (Hyla chrysoscelis) and overloaded the tanks with thousands of tadpoles.
I tried several types of fencing made from hardware cloth, but the Green Frogs climbed over with apparent ease.
The only solution I found was to go out at night with a spot light and hand grab the young male Green Frogs that come up from the ponds and stake out places to attract females.
It was like busting a bunch of teenagers that keep drinking and having sex in your back yard.
I am quite sure that I caught the same frogs many times. Males will do anything to reproduce.
The good news is that each of the 8 breeding tanks had at least 300 of the tree frog tadpoles with only slight contamination by clamitans tadpoles in one of the tanks.
I did remove 2 clutches of clamitans eggs and put those in the ponds.
