Elaine Davies thought little about the environment until she moved to semi-industrial Rosebery, an inner suburb of Sydney. There she discovered her backyard was sheltering the rare green and golden bell frog. In her interview Elaine discusses at length the welfare of this endangered species; and in the excerpt below she describes the bell frog and its beautiful call.
Frogs don’t do much anyway, do they, really when it’s all boiled down? As you saw yourself this morning, one was just lying in the water, and the other was sitting there, basking – not that there’s any sun – but it was just basking; that’s what they do. If they’re disturbed, they’ll dive into the water, or they’ll jump. The small frogs, last year we had a few ‘froglets’ I’ll call them. Now, they came out of the pond and they got up out of the water onto the pond wall, they got over into the other side of the yard, and they just jump around all the time. They go from being a really dark, grey-green to bright green, and they have the gold stripe up either side, goes through to their nose; great big eyes. They’ve got webbed feet but they don’t have pads – a tree frog has big pads on it; they don’t have that – and their song is absolutely superb. They sing rounders. You know how as kids we were taught ‘Row, row, row your boat’ and then everybody got in, well that’s what they do. They start singing and then another one comes in and it’s round. When the old swimming pool was there – they loved the old swimming pool, there’s no doubt about that – when the swimming pool was there they would call all night, every night, all through summer.
