Until a year ago, when I thought of tree frogs, I mainly had in mind those beautiful little brightly colored specimens found in the tropics. That they also occur in the Netherlands was unknown to me. Until I saw some beautiful tree frog pictures on Instagram and found out that these pictures were taken in the Netherlands. Well, I wanted to see them in real life, but that was not so easy.
Tree frogs are very rare in the Netherlands and are therefore also on the red list. And where you can normally use waarneming.nl to easily and accurately find out where and when a particular species has been seen, this is more difficult with the rare species. Here no exact location but an area of 5 by 5 kilometers in which the species has been seen. In such a large area to find a frog that is less than 4 cm in size, that is quite a challenge.
With the tile wisdom "the journey is more important than the destination" in mind, I began my search. Starting point for this was the website waarneming.nl where I looked for the nearest point where a treefrog had been observed. Then further searching on the Internet where quite a few articles can be found about the tree frog and by combining a number of articles the search area suddenly became a lot smaller. By now I had already read about the habitat of the treefrog in the Netherlands and with that knowledge I continued my search on Maps. And there I finally found a small area that met the conditions. Still a gamble but worth a try.
On a sunny Sunday morning in September, we set out early in the direction of Brabant. The piece of land I had chosen was nicely situated between the meadows. Full of good intentions we got out of the car half an hour later. Every bush was checked and we also listened to see if we heard any croaking. But alas, the search did not yield much, besides wet shoes due to the dew. By now we had been on the road for quite some time. Fortunately, we had stuffed our backpack with sandwiches and other goodies, and we thought it was a good time to have lunch. Nice and sunny in the middle of nature tastes just a little better. After lunch we decided to walk through the area one more time.
There we were walking the same piece of land again. With hopes still high, but little time because my club was in action later that afternoon and I didn't want to miss that either. And then we heard a soft croaking. We had looked up the sound earlier so we immediately knew it was the tree frogs. And yes, suddenly there was one sitting on a leaf of a bush. Even smaller than I had imagined but so cute! What a fun culmination of this quest!
After that first one, we saw a few more among the brambles. Carefully, so as not to scare them off in particular, we watched them and tried to get a picture of them. After a while we decided to leave them alone. But what a wonderful morning this was. So for a "sort of" expedition you don't even have to go so far away. Although I would quite like to search for such a brightly colored specimen in the jungle one day 🙂
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