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Vol. 17 · Issue 03  ·  Est. 2009, Portland, OR

Field Reports

Community trip notebooks from the world's amphibian obsessives — 612 firsthand accounts written in swamps, cloud forests, roadside ditches, and high-altitude páramos, each one cross-checked by a regional herpetologist before it enters the archive.

612 trip notebooks published 42,617 verified sightings on file 138 countries represented

Browse by

Open the right notebook

Four ways to cut through 612 reports — pick one, or stack them.

  • Region

    Neotropics · Afrotropics · Indomalaya · Australasia · Nearctic · Palearctic

  • Biome

    Cloud forest · Lowland rainforest · Paramo · Savanna · Wetland · Montane stream

  • Season

    Wet · Dry · Breeding chorus · Post-monsoon · Overwintering · Year-round

  • Contributor tier

    Field-verified · Editor-reviewed · Peer-cited · Featured notebook

Recent trip notebooks

From the archive

A sample of recent entries drawn from the 612-report archive and the 42,617 verified geo-tagged sightings base. Each one passes through a regional herpetologist before publication.

  1. Red-eyed tree frog on a Heliconia leaf at dusk, Costa Rica Neotropics · Wet season

    Report №608 · 02 March 2026 · Caribbean slope, Costa Rica

    A chorus at La Selva after the first rains

    Three nights at the research station turned up eleven species along 600 metres of boardwalk — including a calling male Espadarana prosoblepon I had been chasing for two years. The spectrogram matched the type locality recording within 4%.

    • Species logged11
    • Call recordings9
    • HabitatLowland rainforest

    Reviewed by

    Dr. A. Solís-Brenes

    Regional herpetologist · Costa Rica

    Verified · 4 days
  2. Golden mantella frog on wet moss in Madagascar rainforest Afrotropics · Breeding chorus

    Report №605 · 21 February 2026 · Andasibe-Mantadia, Madagascar

    Three mantellas in a single roadside ditch

    A short afternoon stop on RN2 produced Mantella aurantiaca, M. madagascariensis, and a tentative M. cowanii within forty metres of tarmac. Submitted audio is now part of the call reference library.

    • Species logged7
    • Call recordings5
    • HabitatSubmontane rainforest

    Reviewed by

    H. Rakotomalala

    Regional herpetologist · Madagascar

    Verified · 6 days
  3. Wallace's flying frog on a broad leaf at night, Borneo Indomalaya · Post-monsoon

    Report №601 · 04 February 2026 · Danum Valley, Sabah, Malaysia

    Gliding over the canopy stream at 02:14

    A timed encounter with Rhacophorus nigropalmatus launching from a Ficus — fully extended webbing caught in the headlamp beam for two full seconds. Photographic voucher submitted with full EXIF and GPS pin.

    • Species logged14
    • Photo vouchers22
    • HabitatLowland rainforest

    Reviewed by

    Dr. L. bin Hassan

    Regional herpetologist · Borneo

    Featured notebook
  4. Alpine tree frog on wet granite beside a mountain creek, Australian Alps Australasia · Overwintering

    Report №597 · 18 January 2026 · Kosciuszko National Park, NSW

    A frost-line census at 1,640 m

    Surveyed a 1.2 km transect above the snow gum line in near-freezing conditions. Litoria verreauxii alpina choruses had begun 9 days earlier than the 2019–2024 average — a datum now in the FrogWatch March dataset.

    • Species logged4
    • Call recordings6
    • HabitatSubalpine stream

    Reviewed by

    M. O'Connell

    Regional herpetologist · SE Australia

    Verified · 3 days

Showing 4 of 612 notebooks · last updated 04 March 2026

Browse the full archive

Pull-quote · Featured notebook

"By 23:40 the pandi ditch was loud enough to feel in my sternum. I stopped counting species and started counting questions. Every call I recorded that night now sits next to a type-locality recording from 1987 — the match, where it exists, is striking. Where it doesn't, that's the work."

Renata Oduya

Western Ghats, India · 11 December 2025 · Report №589

Reviewed by Dr. P. Krishnamurthy · Regional herpetologist, Peninsular India

By the numbers

How the review pipeline works

Every sighting and report is checked by a regional herpetologist before it joins the archive. These are the numbers behind that promise.

  • 42,617

    Verified geo-tagged sightings

    cross-checked against regional references

  • 138

    Countries with logged sightings

    from Costa Rica to the Russian Far East

  • 92%

    Reviewed within 7 days

    median turnaround: 4.2 days

  • 380

    Active regional contributors

    volunteer herpetologists on call

An open invitation

Bring your notebook into the Pond.

If you've been out at night with a headlamp and a notebook, you already have a field report. We pair every submission with a regional reviewer, a call-spectrogram upload, and a permanent URL in the 7,548-species archive.

Submit a Field Report Discuss in the Forum

Free for individual contributors · Submissions remain yours · CC-BY-SA licensing optional