Sounds of Scaphiopus couchii - Couch's Spadefoot

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Click the play button or the speaker icon to listen to an mp3 sound file.

Male calling in breeding pool at night.

Male and female in amplexus on a road above flooded wash breeding habitat.

More pictures and information
about this spadefoot

Advertisement Calls

An advertisement call is the most well-known call of a frog. It is produced by a male during the breeding season to attract females of his own species. It can also serve an agressive function to defend his calling site by warning rival males of his presence. Frogs usually make the calls around bodies of water that are suitable for breeding and egg laying. These calls can be heard during the evening and at night, and sometimes during daylight at the peak of the breeding season.

The call of Couch's Spadefoot is a nasal groan descending in pitch similar to a lamb bleating. Calls at night from the edge of temporary ponds.

This is a 16 second recording of the advertisement calls of a group of male Couch's Spadefoots calling from puddles at the edge of an irrigated agricultural field in Yuma County, Arizona (shown below) at night in August. Insects and a Rocky Mountain toad can be heard in the background.

This is a 15 second recording of the advertisement call of one close spadefoot made at the same location in Yuma County, Arizona. Other male spadefoots, insects, and a Rocky Mountain toad can be heard in the background.

Breeding pool in a flooded wash, Pima County, Arizona. The night before this picture was taken, dozens of calling male Couch's Spadefoots lined the banks.

This is a very short recording of a single call from the solo Yuma spadefoot heard above.

Waveform and Sonogram

This is a recording of a single advertisement call of a Couch's Spadefoot recorded at night in Yuma County, Arizona. The image on the right is a visual representation of this call. Click on it to see a larger image. Click here for information about how to read the waveform and sonogram images.

Short Videos

Male spadefoots call at night from a temporary rain pool.	Male and female spadefoots in amplexus in a temporary rain pool.

You can listen to more recordings of Couch's Spadefoots on this cd:

Carlos Davidson - Frog and Toad Calls of the Pacific Coast - Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology

and on the cd that comes with this book:

Lang Elliott, Carl Gerhardt, and Carlos Davidson - The Frogs and Toads of North America - Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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