Plague o' Frogs

 From 1994 - The TV reporter who broke the story was retiring, and had some fun with the story, and made it seem as if there was a rescue of the frogs and showed up with some little nets and got people, including himself, to pose looking in the bog for frogs to catch them to help them across the road. Ran as written in the Star, except they changed Splattin', which is how the man said it, to Splatting. I'm still miffed.

WATERLOO, JULY 26, 1994 - A plague of frogs of biblical proportions has turned a strech of quiet suburban road into a killing field for amphibians.

"I heard the tires splattin' over top of them - there were thousands of them." says Steve Humphries, describing the carnage on the road by a conservation area in the suburb of Erbsville in Waterloo.

Humphries, who owns a garage on the road, says he had to close his garage doors one night recently to stop the swarming frogs from jumping into his shop. Humphries says he is not frightened by the hopping hordes. "Not in the least. They're not coming to get us or anything."

The frogs have been leaping across Beaver Creek Road in record numbers. During peak times, residents say they see the road covered with frogs.

"It had just finished raining - I was driving home - there were thousands, just thousands of frogs" says Cheryl Hendrickson, graduate student in Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo. She had noticed large numbers of frogs before on her drive home in the past few weeks, but says that on previous nights they "were easy to avoid" but that night about a week ago they were all over the road."I tried driving without my lights, but that didn't help - I heard the tires going over them. I stopped and got out to identify them. They were bouncing all around my feet - I noticed a big toad, but most of them were leopard frogs."

Hendrickson, who calls herself "The Frogwoman of Erbsville" after appearing on a local TV news broadcast expressing her concerns about the frogs well-being, says Larry Lamb, a professor in her department, believes the explosion in frog numbers is due to a long damp springs that allowed more frog tadpoles to reach maturity before their puddles dried up.

The road is by Laurel Creek Conservation area. Rod Deacon, a community relations officers with the conservation authority that administers the area says, while frog migrations do occur "It's never happened before in the numbers I've seen." Deacon has advised motorists to avoid using the road during heavy frog transit. Other countries, he says, have found frog-saving solutions for this problem "In England, they have tunnels built under the road for annual migrations."