I have been hearing a voice lately, urgently intoning “Build it and they will come!” Significantly, it is not the creepy disembodied voice heard in the film Field of Dreams, urging Kevin Costner to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, but the voice of real-life herpetologist Brian Gratwicke, the Smithsonian scientist who heads up the Amphibian Ark in Panama, a project to save endangered tropical frogs. 

Brian lives in Virginia and has dug vernal pools in a wet area of his backyard to encourage native amphibians threatened by habitat loss, and he has encouraged me to do the same in my little urban yard near DC. Brian has been rewarded with happy families of wood frogs and spotted salamanders. He is an expert on all things hoppy and wriggly and I think my faith in his judgement is far more reasonable than Costner’s faith in a gratuitous, uncredited narrator.

Therefore, I have shrugged off the skepticism of my spouse and community and built a vernal pool in my own backyard. And just as Kevin Costner was not discouraged by the fact that the players he needed to perform in his field were all long dead, I have not been discouraged by the possibility that all of the amphibians that I hope will come and reproduce in my pool are similarly deceased. On the citizen science app iNaturalist, there have been exactly zero amphibians of any sort reported in my neighborhood in the past fifteen years.

But that hasn’t stopped me. How about you? Amphibians invented lungs, toes and fingers– brilliant innovations we still treasure today. Are we so ungrateful that we can sit back and let this entire limb of our family tree wither?

Who among you will join me in this noble folly? Who will lay down their cell phones, pick up a shovel, and help return the joyous ribbits and croaks (and whatever sounds that salamanders make) to our neighborhood soundscapes? 

You courageous few will find information and inspiration in this short video, and in these inspiring verses from Kermit.