Excerpt reprinted with permission. Frogs, text by David Badger, photographs by John Netherton ISBN 0-89658-314-7 (Voyageur Press, 1995) Introduction "Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog." That sentiment, voiced by a compulsive gambler in Mark Twain's acclaimed short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," first appeared in a New York literary journal in 1865. Of course, that was before color photography was invented—and before nature photographers like John Netherton began to distill the beauty of the natural world through their artistic images. Doubtless, John would rather sidestep the issue of whether one frog's "p'ints" are better than those of any other, yet his vast portfolio of photographs suggests that some p'ints (and, for that matter, some species) are more distinctive or remarkable than others. For more than twenty-five years now, John has been taking photographs of frogs and toads—some exotic, others familiar—on his regular pilgrimages to the Everglades, Great Smoky Mountains, Big South Fork, northern woodlands, southwestern deserts, and abroad. While herons and egrets, or landscapes and abstracts, were foremost on his mind, other fauna and flora caught his eye as well, whether he was waist-deep in duckweed in a bald cypress swamp or braced precariously on a mountain overlook. In the fall of 1993, after completing a book about North American wading birds, At the Water's Edge (Voyageur Press), John decided to pursue his interest in frogs. It was time, he felt, to showcase the beauty of these enchanting creatures, whose secrecy and nocturnal behavior all too often cause them to be overlooked. And so was born the idea for a book about these unsung but highly vocal musicians of the night. My own involvement in this project came about as the result of two chance events. Almost twenty years ago, I saw—and coveted—a color photograph published in the glossy Sunday-magazine section of a Nashville newspaper. The photograph portrayed the head of a green snake with its tongue extended—the spitting image of a snake I had caught many years earlier when I was growing up in Illinois. Walking to school one day, I spotted this snake sunning himself in an alley; I scooped him up and carried him off to my fourth-grade class, where the teacher placed him in a terrarium. My classmates and I admired that snake for weeks, until, as a group, we escorted him to a nearby park and reluctantly set him free. That chance encounter with a suburban green snake sparked my early interest in reptiles and amphibians, an interest that was to continue over the years—not just on the homefront, where my mother tolerated the green snakes I periodically ordered from a snake farm in Louisiana (plus an assortment of newts, lizards, turtles, and one short-lived African clawed frog), but also at a Wisconsin summer camp, where I was a nature counselor for five summers. After briefly considering a career in veterinary medicine, I elected to pursue journalism instead (less bloody) and eventually moved to Nashville to teach writing. But memories of that bygone serpent flooded back when I saw the photograph in the Sunday Tennessean; little did I suspect that a sun-worshipping green snake from the North Shore of Chicago would predestine my introduction to, and later friendship with, a gifted nature photographer who had an eye for interesting reptiles. John and I first "met" when I phoned him to ask whether I could purchase an enlargement of the photograph. He agreed and immediately ordered a print from an out-of-state lab. But its delivery was delayed for months (someone at the lab apparently mislaid the picture), and, in the interim, John felt so terrible that he offered to shoot some pictures for a campus magazine I was editing. By the time the ill-starred snake photo finally turned up, John and I had become friends—and had begun our first collaboration. © 1995 David Badger

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Monday, April 14, 2003 23:05