Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Cortes Island naturalist George Sirk knows a lot about frogs.
GS: “A lot of people know me because of my interest in birds, which is really an addiction, isn't it? I'm just hopeless when it comes to birds. I'm just totally into them. They're so fascinating. I came from Venezuela when I was 10. My parents immigrated to Vancouver and I couldn't speak English. I could speak Spanish and I knew a little Estonian and I could understand German because my parents argued in German.”
“So there I was in Vancouver, a little weird guy 10-years-old, and I met some other weird young people too, what we would call nerds.”
“They were into frogs. Jim Palmer was one, Lowell Orchid, that's another, Jim just passed away actually in December, but Lowell's still with us all here. We used to collect frogs very close to Kits Beach, the Lacarno beach area. It used to be a military base at one time. So there used to be a lot of empty properties, fields and it got very wet in the wintertime. The tree frogs would all go in there and have a great time.”
“We used to get the tree frog eggs, take them home, have our aquariums and feed them algae when they turned into tad poles and then they would turn into little frogs. If you could get the adult frogs, that would be an even better pet. They're very good eaters, you give them little flies and all kinds of things. We would raise the tadpoles and then release all the teeny, teeny tiny frogs, three eights of an inch long. Just barely the width of your small fingernail. That was great fun.”
“I’ve done it for our children and our grandchildren, as they grow up. You get a gallon jar, a few eggs, make sure there's algae in there and watch them grow. You're actually improving their chance of survival, because they don't have the predators in your gallon jar. There's nothing more fun than letting them go, especially with kids.”
“Kim, my wife, did that in the elementary school next to the University of Victoria. She raised the little tadpoles to a little tiny, tiny mature frogs. The kids could watch the frogs for two months in the classroom. We went across the street into the pond area tof the university, with the school kids and let them all go into the grass. So they were just beside themselves that these little frogs were all hopping away into nature.”
“We used to collect salamanders too. It became a great hobby, going to different places, catching salamanders and bringing them home. Don't ever keep newts by the way. They are the worst pet in the world. They will not eat. They will refuse to eat. They need a very specialized little mini-pond as an aquarium. Clouded salamanders or wandering salamanders, they're great eaters, but you always have to make sure that you're letting them go after you've had them for a little while.”
“I just felt totally in love with different frogs. Vancouver used to have ditches, so you'd had green frogs and bullfrogs. They were all introduced, so we would catch them and keep them as well.”
“So, bringing it to Cortes, we have two species of frog here. We've got the red-legged frog, the tree frog and one toad - bufo boreas, the northwestern toad, but I won't talk too much about the toad. That's another show. Something has happened to the toad population on Cortes as it's plummeted. They're virtually gone from Cortes, but not the tree frogs.”
“Now they've changed the name of the frog to Chorus Frog, and I just hate it when scientists start meddling with names that have been around for a long time. Somebody gets a PhD and once again, they change the name. I still call them tree frogs because they don't chorus all the time and they actually do climb trees.”
Photo Credit: George Sirk in Lancaster Sound, Nunavut, with Cruise North Expeditions - submitted photo
