And for that reason, it was just the dreary sort of night that could drag Gary Fellers away from leftover Thanksgiving turkey into the boot-deep muck of Cemetery Pond. Tonight the front still lingers, but it has thinned enough to allow a gibbous moon, casting colored halos through fast-moving clouds, to illuminate our short hike into the ranchland of Point Reyes National Seashore . Fellers, the park scientist, and freelance biologist Chris Corben rest binoculars atop the flashlights protruding from their lips and slowly scan the pond. Just above a green skin of algae and duckweed and just below thick stands of rushes, tiny green gems glitter in the beams. They are the eyes of the quarry.
Fellers is also impressed.
Last night we got nine, and already it looks as if there are at least a dozen more out there. Not so long ago it would have been nothing special to see a dozen red-legged frogs in a California pond. When, in 1915 and 1919, zoologists Joseph Grinnell and Tracy Storer meandered through the mountain streams and alpine ponds in and around Yosemite National Park, they found Rana aurora populations in three places. But when Fellers retraced the naturalists' steps in 1992 and 1993, red-legged frogs were nowhere to be found, even though their habitats still appeared healthy. Three years later R. aurora was added to the list of endangered species.