Spring Peepers, Prince Edward Island

I little bit of fun from last week’s trip to Prince Edward Island. Phillip (primary off-grid investigator), Lindsay (audio technician / publicist extraordinary) and I stayed at a fantastic solar-powered cabin on the beach in Goose River: lobster was plentiful, clouds were sporadic (sporadic enough to make solar-heated showers a rarity), and when the sun went down the Spring Peepers came out in force. Easily mistaken for a hoard of crickets (as is evident in the video), the Peeper is a small chorus frog apparently common on the Eastern seaboard. It’s listed, perhaps not surprisingly, as a species of “least concern” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature; although we couldn’t catch sight of a single one, rest assured there were several thousand of them. The Peeper has the uncanny – and unnerving – ability to overwhelm all other sounds (as is also evident in the video), making it nearly impossible to enjoy a twilit porch Skype session with loved ones back home.

It was Michelle Mather, whose off-grid home in Ontario I wrote about my post ‘Dwelling off the grids: Ontario’, who pointed out that the marshland swarm was in fact Spring Peepers, and not crickets, after seeing this little sketch. Many thanks Michelle, and please excuse my British Columbian ignorance.