Kawaii!

Hi folks — I’m taking a writing course and I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise to me, but it’s eating into my overall writing time. I hope to be back with y’all soon, but in the meantime, enjoy some cuteness overload with my good friend Alfred, a ground squirrel who lives in the Grand Tetons.

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One recommendation before I go: this week, I listened to the crossover podcast between the Living Planet (produced by Deutsche Walle, a German media organization) and NPR’s The Wild with Chris Morgan, and thought it was pretty great. I particularly loved hearing about an Australian citizen science project on frogs, called Frog ID. Using Frog ID, anyone in Australia can upload a recording of frogs to be ID’d by the scientists at the Australian Museum.

It’s like a Shazam (a music identifier), but for frogs, and using scientists instead of artificial intelligence to make the identification.

Not all of us can live in Australia, of course — it would get awfully crowded if we tried — but at least we can now hear some of the wild noises of Australian frogdom. Some of my favorites include (scroll down a little to get to the “play” button to hear the calls):

• the Northern whistling frog

• the Creaking nursery frog

• the Moaning frog

• and the Northern banjo frog

Frogs in general are in real trouble (something I might write about at more length later), so I’m glad to know about efforts underway to better understand and celebrate these incredible creatures.