Port Stephens – A Great Place to be a Frog!

Port Stephens – A Great Place to be a Frog!

by Grant Webster (PhD Candidate; University of New England)

The Fingal Bay Wetlands – a semi-permanent swamp with a dense canopy of Broad-leaved Paperbark and Swamp Mahogany (C) Grant Webster

As someone who grew up in Sydney, having an interest in frogs wasn’t always an easy thing to nurture. Local creeks or golf course ponds would be populated by the same four or five, more ‘tolerant’ species, i.e. those able to withstand the increased pollution and degraded conditions of Sydney’s metropolitan area. When I was fortunate enough to convince my dad to take to me to the more ‘remote’ national parks on Sydney’s outskirts there were invariably a few more frogs to “add to the list”, even sometimes threatened species including the Red-crowned Toadlet (Pseudophryne australis) and Giant Burrowing Frog (Heleioporus australiacus); pretty cool things for an enthusiastic teenager. But relative to the ~100 or so species of frogs that live in New South Wales (and ~40ish on the Central/Mid-north Coast), finding any location near to me with many species proved difficult.

During school holidays, my parents would take my sisters and I to Port Stephens. Our neighbours back home had told of a holiday town called Fingal Bay, and my parents fell in love with it after our first visit. Eventually they bought a house there, but in the interim we would spend weeks at holiday rentals. Naturally, this proved a novel and consistent opportunity for me to embrace my passion for “frogging”, as it’s called. Anyone who lives in Port Stephens, particularly on the Tomaree or Tilligerry Peninsulas would know there are wetlands everywhere. From here, the sound of frogs echo nearly year-round. During my first visit to the region, in winter 2003, I participated in guided walk run by National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) through the Shoal Bay wetlands. While I don’t think we saw any frogs, I heard plenty and kept the site ‘in mind’ for future visits. However, on that trip I did encounter seven species; six from around the wetlands on Gan Gan Road, including two I had not seen in Sydney – the Wallum Froglet (Crinia tinnula) and Haswell’s Froglet, (Paracrinia haswelli). The seventh species, the Red-backed Toadlet (Pseudophryne coriacea) we found on a walk through the more ‘inland’ Wallaroo State Forest. I was convinced this region had a lot to offer.

Returning in 2005, and after asking the local NPWS office for some suggestions on good frog spots, I had accumulated a list of 10 species from Tomaree National Park (more than the 3 or 4 ‘officially’ recorded for that National Park at the time). Most of my findings came from the wetlands of Shoal Bay, Gan Gan Road, and particularly Fingal Bay, where a swamp just behind the beach became a ‘regular’. Usually, our family holidays were during autumn or winter, which for frogs generally isn’t the best time of year (being cold blooded animals). Port Stephens (and much of southern Australia) actually has two frog “seasons”, a cool and a warm season, with different species active in each. During my first spring visit in 2007, I encountered an unusual frog at the Fingal Bay wetland. It was a Uperoleia (a small ground frog), that matched nothing in any of the frog books; and in 2016 it was described as a new species, Mahony’s Toadlet (Uperoleia mahonyi). Little did I know that by 2019 I would embark on an [ongoing…] PhD project, specifically on the conservation and ecology of Mahony’s Toadlet. This project has taken me right across Port Stephens; and by now my ‘frog tally’ for peninsular Port Stephens stands at 17 species; with 14 in Tomaree National Park alone!