A frog we hadn't recorded since 2009 turned up in a survey
A night survey in the Kodagu buffer forest found a Resplendent Shrub Frog, a species last seen in the area in 2009. It was sitting on a sapling we planted in 2021.
The team was out counting bush frogs by torchlight in the Kodagu buffer forest when one of the field assistants, Reshma Kushalappa, stopped and pointed her torch. She recognised the call before she saw the animal, a short clean whistle she had only heard on old recordings. It was a Resplendent Shrub Frog, sitting on a sapling we planted in 2021.
They logged six individuals across two nights, all within about 200 metres of each other in the wetter ground near the stream. Reshma photographed each one and recorded the calls so the identification did not rest on memory alone.
The species was last seen in this area in 2009, before the coffee that used to cover this slope was pulled back and we began replanting native shade. The nearest confirmed population we know of is more than 40km away, across two ridges and a valley of plantation.
That leaves two possibilities, and we cannot yet say which. Either a few frogs held on somewhere quiet through the bad years and we simply never found them, or they have moved back in as the canopy closed and the ground held moisture again. Neither would surprise us.
One frog is not a recovery, and we are wary of saying more than the evidence allows. Amphibians are among the first things to vanish when a place degrades and among the slowest to return when it heals, so a record like this is worth taking seriously without overstating it.
The records are now with the herpetology group in Dr Amara Okonkwo's network at the University of Leeds for independent confirmation. If they hold up, we will go back next monsoon and try to work out whether there is a breeding population or just a handful of survivors passing through.
