A Season with Holbrook's Chorus Frog (Pseudacris ornata)

Abstract

The genus Pseudacris, comprising about a dozen forms, ranges widely over North America, from Great Bear Lake in the north to Arizona and Florida in the south. It avoids the entire Pacific Coast and the Atlantic Coast from Long Island northward. The Southeastern United States may be fairly regarded as the center of its abundance. Georgia, for example, with no less than five different forms, boasts fully as many as-possibly more than-any other state. The extremely puzzling taxonomy of the genus is still far from being fully elucidated. Among its congeners, Pseudacris ornata is noteworthy for its size and elegance, the paucity of its distributional records, and the meagerness of information concerning its life history. The reason for its having been so largely overlooked is perhaps twofold: comparatively few herpetologists are afield during its winter breeding season, and it apparently leads a very secretive life at other seasons of the year. In my first nine trips to the Okefinokee Swamp region (1912 to 1933, chiefly during the warmer months), I had encountered no more than a single individual of this species (Copeia, 1931, no. 4, p. 159). During the winter of 1935-36, however, I found it to be a fairly common, welldistributed, and vociferous frog in Charlton County, on the eastern border of the swamp. In March I was also fortunate in hearing it in Ware and Liberty Counties, and, in April, in collecting transformed or transforming individuals in Camden and Burke Counties, Ga. The species was originally described by Dr. Holbrook in 1836, from the vicinity of Charleston, S. C. In subsequent years additional records have accumulated rather slowly, from the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi. Meanwhile there have not been wanting reports from Texas and Oklahoma, but these have evidently been due to misidentification. The following references are practically all that I have found in the literature, pertaining to the species as understood at present.