How does one tell if the chorus of nighttime chirping, whirring, cheeping is coming from insects or amphibians?
(Note that not all frogs make a distinct “croak croak croak” noise.)
I’ve wondered this for a long time. Last night we had the windows open, and the chirping & cheeping was going on, but it was suddenly augmented by one much louder than the rest, and a distinct “chirp! chirp! chirp!”. I thought … that’s gotta be a frog. Tracked the sound to it’s source, and I was wrong - it was a cricket that had gotten into the house with us.
I’m not aware of any foolproof way to distinguish frogs and insects, except through familiarity with the local fauna. Many frogs can sound quite insectlike. As a very general thing, insects tend to sound more mechanical and continue incessantly without pause, while the calls of frogs may be more intermittent, but this is not a reliable distinction.
I’ve been told that the cadence of a cricket’s chirp increases as the air temperature rises, and decreases as the air temperature falls. Not sure if that’s also true of frogs, since they generally are found in water, but that might be one way to tell them apart.
Here, the peepers are extremely vocal in spring, but don’t make much noise after that. They sound very much like crickets.
On the other hand, crickets seem to be uniformly deafening and around here, are loudest from mid-summer on warm nights, until the temperatures start dropping.
As I indicated above, on the local level or in special circumstances, there may be some ways to tell them apart. However, the methods you’re mentioning don’t apply in general; they depend on knowledge of the local fauna. Differences found in spring in the northeastern US aren’t much use in the tropics, for example.
Yes, you’re absolutely correct.
So I guess until the OP reports back with more precise details and a location, we will never be able to answer this question.
Frogs are amazing! I live somewhere so dry, not even Jeeps rust!
Yet, every now and then, in the spring, a lone frog will show up and start croaking. Only ever see one, and he croaks in the little cement planter or hinds in a pot. Only hear him a couple nights, then the cat or dog probably get him.
Strangest damn thing. I have no idea where he’s coming from. Maybe eggs hatching from the mud from the previous winter. Who knows?
Amazingly for animals that are so dependent on water, there are several species of toads that live in deserts, in particular spadefoot toads. They spend most of their lives underground and only emerge when it rains.
Members of one group of common tree-frogs in North America are called Cricket Frogs, for obvious reasons. There are online sources you can google that will enable you to listen to the choruses of frogs, and learn to recognize them. Most species of frogs and toads can be identified by voice alone.
It’d be nice if there was a way to put a recording on the interwebs & post a link. Barring that, I guess we have to settle for "it sounds like “bzeepbzzeppzirpzirp”
In most species, the voices of small tree-frogs have much, much more carrying power than crickets, and can be heard from a great distance – over a mile in some species. Standing within a chorus of them, they can be loud enough to hurt your ears, if you’re not inured to loud environments.
Aside from that, the answer to the OPs question is that you can distinguish insects from frogs only by familiarizing yourself with both of them and sorting them out by experience, in cases where there is a similarity.
