Take a first glance at the thumbnail above and you might think this video was taken at the shores of a wetland - and perhaps, technically speaking, it was. But if that word applies, the type of wetland it represents is small and decidedly temporary.

This video was taken at the vernal pond down the road from my house. These are the small, temporary, standing bodies of water in the fields that occur with the heavy rainfall of spring here in the midwestern United States. To take this video I was literally standing (well, crouching) at the edge of the road, and at the top of the ditch. This isn’t out in some wooded bog - it’s sitting in a field that, in a relatively short period of time will start hosting either corn or soybeans. It’s essentially a big puddle.

This morning presented with beautiful weather - a little crazy, since it seems like just last week I was writing about snow - so I was walking the yard and drinking coffee with the dogs (err - that is - the dogs and I were walking; only I had coffee. I have no objection to dogs drinking coffee if they like, but they’d need to make their own - I’m not sharing mine...). I was surprised to hear the frogs singing from down the road.

I’ve heard this before, but it’s typically been at night. If they typically sing during the day it’s not a phenomenon I’m aware of. I wanted a record of it, and so I broke out my trike and went on a brief adventure.

The frogs sing loudly, that much is clear. You can hear them in the video, of course, but realize also that this pond is about a quarter mile away from where I was walking in my yard when I first heard them. In the background you will also hear birds, primarily redwing blackbirds, providing accompaniment.

All of this never fails to fascinate me. You expect to see and experience this when you are standing at the edge of a marsh, perhaps bounded by a woodland, a permanent fixture to allow nature to take hold. But this is a temporary fixture - it will be gone within a week or two, leaving just a soggy spot on the ground. The nearest stream or creek (that’s pronounced "crick") of any size is a mile to a mile and a half away. And yet there are frogs here, in abundance.

If you look at the background to the video you can see the open field. And of course we are in a wind farm, and so you can see the turbines, one of which overshadows this spot (I suppose it’s doubly astonishing that the frogs haven’t all died of cancer, given that). The rain has been prodigious this spring, so the ponds have been deep enough to attract water foul - I saw a duck swimming here yesterday as I drove by, and I’ve seen geese in other ponds in the area as well.

I suppose, all in all, nature finds a way.