Calm, flowing creek with night-time frog calls

Full Episode description

No music, no voices, just the sound of a gentle stream and frogs calling on a still, cool night in regional Victoria.

Moonlight floods the landscape of Wadawurrung country. Big, old candlebarks stand still and silent and a creek flows through a shallow valley. Grasses grow up to the waist, except where kangaroos have been nibbling them! And within the sedges by the creek lurk frogs who revel in the still night, the cold air and the perfect opportunity to sing for a mate.

It’s hard to hear many of the other sounds above the water flowing and the frogs, but there are actually many creatures in this recording if you’ve got very good ears and time to listen hard.

Listening notes from Ann Jones:

01:50 Common eastern froglet with a “creaky-creaky-creaky” call. Don’t let the name fool you — these are tiny frogs, with a maximum size of 3cm. The best way to see them is to wait until night and use a torch to try and see tiny little eyes on the edge of the water. They will appear in almost any habitat really, they’re not too picky and will probably breed at any time of year also.

24:00 The brown tree frogs are calling. These are medium frogs – that means they’ll only get up to about 4.5cm. It’s a pretty common little frog throughout the south-eastern part of the mainland – and will be heard in natural areas, farms and even in town! They’ll call at basically any time of year.

25:42 A female powerful owl is calling in the distance. This is Australia’s largest owl, and the female’s call is ringing out across her territory.

38:48 A female fox is calling in a characteristic scream/cough, though it’s very faint with all the rowdy frogs. She’s advertising her presence to other foxes, and who knows if she got a response. She did set distant dogs off barking though! These dogs bark on and off throughout this whole recording. Their voices really carry – I think they were well over a kilometre away. You can just hear their lower tones floating underneath the close water and frog sound.

44:27 A possum in a tree being rowdy as it cullumps through the branches.

51:20 Sugar gliders are nearby, chirping out their little barks. And also…. if you listen closely, you can hear a launch, silence while she glides, and a landing. To be fair though, this could be a ringtail in the tree, as shortly after the noises, a ringtail starts calling. Possibly more likely to be a ringtail, they’re more clumsy.

52:05 The ringtail sounds like an extremely high-frequency horse’s whinny. They almost sound like insects. They have a prehensile tail, meaning they use it to grip branches, or to carry things, like bunches of leaves back to their hollows. The ringtails in Victoria are, I think, much cuter than the ringtails further north. Gauntlet thrown.

1:34:45 I think this sharp, strong insect sound is possibly a katydid.

2:12:40 You can hear the scolding, throat-clearing calls of the brush-tailed possums. There are several through this recording and they also move through trees, in a very characteristically noisy way throughout the soundscape. If you hear rustling, it’s likely a possum looting a tree.

2:38:10 This is one of those breaks, where all the frogs just decide, through some cue, to stop calling all at once in an area. Then, one will start up — and it all kicks off again.