Sleeping by Day, Working by Night - The Frog Diaries

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if we were nocturnal… 
sleeping during the day and wide awake at night?

Speaking from experience I can tell you there are so many wonderful creatures that do come out after sunset. This includes one of our New Zealand native frog species - the Archey’s frog.

In 2018 I was working for the Department of Conservation as a Biodiversity Ranger (fauna) testing out computer software for Archey’s frog photo identification. As part of this work I was given the opportunity to head out into the bush in my first week for four nights of Archey’s frog monitoring.

Each night our work would start an hour after sunset (approximately 9:20pm). We would head out to our 10m x 10m grid where we each thoroughly searched a 2m x 10m section for emergent Archey’s frogs (those outside of logs/above leaf litter). We had a team of four people, so those that completed their sections first would move on to the final 2m x 10m section.

Most of this work was spent cautiously crouching down peeling through ferns, checking every centimetre of ground for frogs before moving a foot into that area. The frogs we found within our grid ranged from 1cm-4cm and had a variety of colours including brown, red and green. Searching the grid would take two hours. Then the processing would begin with the frogs being transported back to the hut where they were arranged in size classes and individually photographed on the mirrored stage, weighed and measured. After processing, the frogs would be placed back exactly where they were found (marked out with reflective markers when caught). Work would run into the early hours of the morning (our longest night ran until 3:30am).

The best nights were those which had damp forest floor but humid conditions. We were able to process 52 frogs on our biggest night. After finishing work, we would sleep until mid-morning/ lunch time (earplugs and a sleep mask were incredibly helpful).

After a couple of nights on a new sleep schedule we were able to get into our own time zone, although coming back out of being nocturnal was much harder!
It was sad to leave such an incredible place.

Not many people would ever have the opportunity to experience such large volumes of frogs in one area. Even heading to the toilet along the boardwalk you had to be extremely careful. Not only were there frogs every step, the invertebrates were thriving, and the birds were happily singing loud and proud every day (especially the cuckoo).

I was lucky to have a sneak peek at what Aotearoa may have been like previously, teeming with native wildlife.
Wouldn’t it be incredible for these small havens to become more widespread?