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I have heard Chorus Frogs every spring for my entire life, but I never saw one until the May of 2008. I was following Mike Forsberg around southeastern Montana in search of stories and photographs for Mike’s book, GREAT PLAINS, America’s lingering wild. I can’t remember what our objective was but we were in the middle of an enormous pasture and we were walking. It takes a long time to walk anywhere with Forsberg because he stops and looks at everything. When you walk with any good photographer what you are really doing is wandering. So I was wandering around southeastern Montana with Mike Forsberg on a beautiful spring afternoon taking pictures of flowers, clouds, rusty barbed wire fences, and windmills when the faint sound of Chorus Frogs drifted over a hill. The vocalization of a Chorus Frog is a little like a variety of small frogs known collectively as “tree frogs and their allies.” The Chorus Frog must be an “ally” because they are often found where there are no trees for miles. That was the case that day in Montana – no trees, just grass and a little wind. The sound of the frogs blended in with the rustle of the wind and the songs of prairie, ground nesting birds that were newly back from their winter migration. Male Meadow Larks, Bobolinks, and Buntings were setting up territories and serenading the females with all their hearts. Probably the singing of the Chorus Frog had been blending with the ambient sounds for a while before we even noticed it, but as the afternoon wore on, the sound intensified until Mike couldn’t stand it. “Have you ever seen one of those little devils?” I shrugged. “No. I’ve never even looked for one.” In fact, Chorus Frogs are such a commonfeature of the Great Plains that I had never even thought much about them. Since I could remember, they were a constant in the soundtrack of my spring existence. When we walked over the hill and found a small stock-pond created by adikebuilt across a little draw. Spring runoff had filled the pond and the Chorus Frogs were doing the amphibious version of what the birds were doing. Their shrill voices seemed to rise from the water’s edge of the entire pond. My Peterson Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians describes the sound of the Chorus Frog as prreep, prreep, but that description does not do it justice. It is an insistent sound when you concentrate on it but has the ability to recede in your consciousness until it is barely noticeable. The pond was alive with singers and we crept, shoulder to shoulder, up to the water where one particularly boisterous frog was sounding off. We moved like a pair of blue herons, very slowly, raising high and planting gently one foot at a time. When we got to the edge of the pond the sound was gone and I looked carefully, expecting the frog to leap into the water and disappear. There was no leap and splash so we bent over and squinted along the grassy edge. Still nothing. He must have heard us and took off, so we split up and started off in search of the next frog. But we had only gone a few feet when the first frog started up again – exactly where we had been looking. We went back but still saw nothing. Other frogs were singing just a little way along the water’s edge so we moved off again in opposite directions. I was intent on sneaking up on one before …