The great frog rescue of 2014 started -- sorry to say and may they rest in peace -- with the great frog massacre of 2013.

Oh, that ghastly night. That deadly night.

Conditions near Linnton, along busy U.S. 30, were premium for a northern red-legged frog migration: the cover of darkness in early January; temperatures hovering in the mid to high 40s; and spilling from the sky, reliable Oregon rain.

During migrations worldwide, other species large and small swim, fly or amble to find food or mates, to lay eggs, give birth or escape untenable climates. Frogs, naturally, hop. Instinct sent these bolting from the safety of Forest Park, where they mostly live, toward the few ponds and wetlands remaining in suburban Northwest Portland's industrial strip, where they breed and lay eggs.

We'll never know if they comprehended the obstacles in their path.

Could they possibly have grasped the grave dangers of crossing two surface streets, a roaring four-lane highway, train tracks and potential encounters with the usual predators – birds, snakes and the like?

Surely, even if the frogs had the capacity for such thought, they'd never have dreamed that a few dozen soft-hearted, ecologically mindful Oregonians would organize, study, plan and inconvenience themselves, night after night for three months, to help them get to the other side.

Though the frogs or their ancestors had likely traveled a similar route for thousands or perhaps millions of years, it's doubtful anyone over the eons had ever bothered to assist.

***

Shawn Looney steered her Toyota Prius off U.S. 30 up N.W. Harborton Drive. On that evening in the winter of 2013, wet pavement glistened beneath the headlights.

Something else did, too.

Frogs.

Dozens of frogs – maybe hundreds – hopped down a steep bank, across sparsely traveled Harborton and off into the dark toward U.S. 30, thick with rush-hour traffic.

Looney slowed way down. She straddled the amphibians with her car's tires and swerved to miss them as she headed toward Rob Lee's house at the top of the grade. In their 60s, the friends are dedicated community activists and volunteers, and she'd planned to give Lee a lift to that night's West Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District meeting.

"Oh, my god, Rob," she remembers saying, "there are frogs everywhere."

Lee got in the car and they rolled back down the hill at a snail's pace, trying not to kill any.

A couple hours later, when Looney drove Lee home, they didn't see one frog on the road. "There was no hopping going on," she says.

The next morning in the daylight, Lee investigated.

He found the aftermath of the impossible matchup between some of Earth's most fragile creatures and the steel behemoths that get most of us where we want to go. Everywhere Lee looked on Harborton and U.S. 30, cars and trucks had smashed frogs to smithereens.

They weren't the invasive, non-native bullfrogs that conservationists love to hate, either. They were northern red-legged frogs, a protected species that ranges from southwest British Columbia to northern California. They're classified as sensitive-vulnerable, meaning wildlife managers keep an eye on them because the species shows signs of decline.

Dwindling numbers of red-leggeds and many other frog species globally are a red flag, an indicator that nature is out of balance.

Frogs and other amphibians are critical components in the food chain and they should be abundant. As they slip away, so does biodiversity, the animal and plant variety that makes the natural world go 'round.

Biologists and others are super worried about frogs.

Internationally, among the 7,250 known species, at least 2,469 species have suffered population drops. Nearly 168 amphibian species are believed to have gone extinct in the last two decades. A study published last year in the journal PLOS ONE found that in the United States, amphibians are disappearing at a rate of nearly 4 percent a year.

Not all the reasons are known, though some are.

We've messed mightily with their habitats by cutting forests, filling wetlands, building roads through frog migration routes and eradicating from urban environments such species as beavers, frequent architects and engineers of the ponds frogs need.

NORTHERN RED-LEGGED FROGS: LEARN MORE

LATIN NAME:

Rana aurora

HABITAT:

They like cool, damp forests and wetlands, mostly below 3,000 feet.

COLORATION:

Adults have red underlegs, thus the name.

EGGS:

Egg masses are soft, jelly-like globs about the size of a grapefruit. They’re attached to vegetation below the water’s surface. Later, it breaks free and floats to the surface before tadpoles hatch and disperse. Eggs hatch in 30 to 45 days and reach metamorphosis 11 to 14 weeks later.

JUVENILES:

They stick around their natal pond for days to weeks before dispersing. These Northwest Portland frogs could start moving toward Forest Park when the fall rains come.

LONGEVITY:

It's unknown, though in captivity they've lived as old as 10.

Chytridiomycosis, a fungal infection that has spread across much of the world, and has reached Oregon, has devastated some frog populations.

Scientists suspect climate change may adversely impact frogs, which depend on water. Prolonged drought, such as the current historic dry stretch in California, may also play a role in frogs' decline.

Pesticide residue has been found in frog tissue and scientists suspect it may play a role, possibly by suppressing frogs' immune systems.

And then there are American bullfrogs, native to eastern North America but introduced to Oregon in the early 1900s by entrepreneurs who thought folks out here would take a fancy to eating frog legs. Of all the food trends that have flourished in the Northwest, that one did not.

Bullfrogs did, though.

They're hungry suckers and fearsome hunters, devouring native frogs, small turtles – anything they can wrap their jaws around -- according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Considered one of the world's 100 most invasive species, one bullfrog can lay up to 20,000 eggs in a season, exponentially outnumbering a red-legged's 200 to 1,100 eggs.

The disappearance of native frogs is of such grave concern that in 2000, Congress created the Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative, which aims to identify causes for declines and find ways to reverse them.

It's doubtful that many front-line solutions include catching frogs by hand, taxiing them across surface streets, railroad tracks and a highway, pointing them toward their natal pond, and sending them off with a few encouraging words.

Git along, little froggy.

***



After witnessing the N.W. Harborton Drive frog slaughter with his friend, Shawn Looney, Rob Lee started making calls and e-mailing biologists and herpetologists.

"I started trying to find the appropriate people to tell about this – that something was going on that we should be paying attention to," he says.

He also approached Jane Hartline, a retired Oregon Zoo marketing director and conservation advocate with a knack for organizing.

No one knew whether the great frog massacre of 2013 was an anomaly or, more likely, an unwitting annual death march. They were determined to find out, to help the frogs if they could, to precisely document everything they observed and to contribute to the scant science on the Forest Park red-legged frog population.

Liz Ruther, a habitat conservation biologist with ODFW, granted Lee, Looney and Hartline a permit to handle the frogs. Without one, it's illegal to touch or harass them, given the species' sensitive-vulnerable status.

With help from The Forest Park Conservancy, Hartline rounded up about three dozen volunteers willing to rush to Linnton with little notice. Their task: spend hours intercepting frogs on wet, chilly nights when most Portlanders were tucked in at home, dry and cozy.

Though one volunteer was a state biologist who knows her frogs, many others had never even touched one.

Northern red-leggeds are slim-waisted beauties, about 3 inches long, elegantly mottled and perfectly camouflaged with skin often the same color as the decaying maple or oak leaves that carpet their forest floor home. A light stripe along their jawline stands out against their dark facial mask.

They're so secretive they're seldom seen in the woods. And they're powerful, their legs springier than a gymnast's.

Lee marked his calendar. Jan. 1, 2014, read "frogs." That was about a week earlier than he and Looney had noticed them the previous winter.

That evening, equipped with a digital thermometer and a notebook, he began making nightly treks on foot out of his house, down toward the Harborton-U.S. 30 intersection.

There, the Douglas fir, alder and maple forest gives way to steep cliffs, mossy boulders and dripping ferns. A small stream, the drainage the frogs use as their migration roadmap, spills down and disappears into a culvert.

Before Portland grew into the city it is, the frogs' journey would have been an easy one from the riparian zone to the vast wetlands that once lined the Willamette River and Multnomah Channel.

Damming the Guild's Lake outlet was the beginning of the end for a vast wetlands complex.

Today, those marshes and ponds are paved with industry. Alteration of the habitat began in 1905, when contractors dammed the outlet from Guild's Lake to prepare for that year's Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. No one knew back then what a critical role wetlands play in healthy ecosystems.

The ponds where this red-legged frog population's females deposit eggs is now owned and being restored by Portland General Electric.

Every night, Lee recorded the time, temperature and weather conditions, which he shared each morning with state biologists. He and the others knew from their research that frogs migrate only when it's wet. They've since determined, for this population, that a few might move when it's as chilly as 43 degrees, more hop from the forest at 45 and by 47 degrees, they swarm by the hundreds toward their ponds.

Lee started seeing frogs within a few days and the first call for volunteer frog catchers went out January 7.

The biologists advised volunteers on the best ways to catch, handle and transport frogs without harming them: Shine a light on them and they freeze. Approach from the front – they can't hop backward. Cup your hands over them, pick them up and hold firmly enough so they won't escape but gently enough so you won't hurt them.

"The first time you catch one," says Lee, a distinguished looking fellow in Gore-Tex and a white beard, "everybody's afraid. I was afraid."

It happened one night during that first week in January, when he spotted a frog boing, boing, boinging across Harborton. Lee knew what he had to do.

"They feel cool and wet and very alive," he says. "They're really strong. Sometimes, there's some slimy bits. Who knows what that is. I don't even want to know. ... Now I'm really good at it. I'm a one-handed frog catcher."

He and other volunteers came equipped with flashlights, headlamps, reflective vests and 5-gallon plastic buckets lined with soggy, frog-hued maple leaves. The bucket lids had holes cut so catchers could slip frogs inside but the amphibians couldn't escape.

One bucket they kept separate: It was for chorus frogs also making the migration; they couldn't co-mingle or the red-legged frogs might eat their smaller chorus brethren.

Unlike grandly melodious chorus frogs, red-leggeds are quieter. Instead of ribbets or croaks, they creak softly.

Inside the buckets, Lee says, "you can hear them complaining. It sounds like they're having a conversation sometimes."

He says an unexpected bonus of the red-legged frog roundup is how many interesting, like-minded people he's encountered and how much fun it has been. Meeting strangers first in the dark, he says, is oddly intimate. "It's easy to warm up to people in the dark."

Depending on how busy the nights were – volunteers caught 365 frogs one night – they transported the animals as quickly as possible, trying not to crowd more than a dozen frogs in a bucket. They seldom kept them contained for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

Jane Hartline, volunteer coordinator for the frog rescue, also works on turtle conservation projects.

Hartline or one of the others drove the buckets down Harborton, across U.S. 30 and the railroad tracks and toward the wetland. They slipped the bucket lids off, releasing the frogs in the grass near the ponds.

Perhaps it's no surprise that the presence of bucket-bearing, flashlight wielding people strolling the edges of a rural road in the night prompted a suspicious-activity call to the sheriff. Hartline had some explaining to do and, because she didn't have any live frogs at the moment, she introduced the deputy to a dead one.

Then there was the night in late February when she zipped off an email to volunteers. It began: "Harborton Frog Wranglers, we have a situation."

The cast and crew for TV's "Grimm" planned to film a scene in which a body gets dragged across the railroad tracks into the frogs' wetland.

"They've promised," Hartline, wrote, "they won't really go into the wetland where they might step on egg masses."

But the forecast called for 47 degrees with rain beginning about 9 p.m. The wranglers expected lots of migratory action. "The 'Grimm' crew will be out there until 10," Hartline wrote, "and will then be moving all their cars and trucks off the site. Yikes!!!!!!"

The night stayed dry. The frogs stayed put. Whew.

***

As rains came all winter and into spring, so have frogs and frog catchers, who sometimes stay out until 1 or 2 a.m., devoted to their task.

As of last week, volunteers had caught and transported around 650 red-legged frogs moving down from the forest to the wetland, many with rounded bellies filled with eggs. They taxied about 565 frogs headed the other direction, uphill toward Forest Park, their breeding and egg laying duty done.

They saw at least 100 dead frogs and figure the number was much higher. Of course, many slipped by unnoticed, and when vehicles ran the frogs down, the frog catchers say, a fishy smell lingered in the air.

A few volunteers paddled the wetland in kayaks and canoes one recent day, looking for red-legged frog egg masses. They counted more than 350.

They know the season – and the great frog rescue of 2014 – is winding down. Yet, even late last week, volunteers shepherded frogs back to the forest. They don't plan to call it quits, Hartline says, until they have a warm, wet night without a frog in sight.

Volunteers had no idea when they started what a commitment frog wrangling would become. Yet, from the time they realized the migration was not an anomaly, they talked about the future.

Would they try the same approach next winter and the one after and on and on? Would they build fences to block frogs from the traffic, or ponds on the Forest Park side of the highway, giving frogs a new option?

Could they possibly persuade the Oregon Department of Transportation to construct a wildlife-only overpass, giving frogs and other species safe passage? Similar wildlife corridor approaches have worked elsewhere but political will for such a solution would have to be mighty.

The discussions continue.

"Next year around January," Looney says, "we're probably going to start the whole thing over again. What are ya gonna do? We're not gonna give up now."

-- Katy Muldoon