SAVE THE FROGS! · Field Studies
The Amphibian
Field Journal
A naturalist's notebook, brought to life in code — every frog, tadpole and salamander here is drawn stroke by stroke, no photographs.
The forest floor is awake.
Amphibians are the planet's great survivors and its most delicate barometers — breathing partly through their skin, they read the health of a wetland the way a thermometer reads a fever. This journal is a small tribute to them, kept by SAVE THE FROGS!, the world's leading amphibian conservation organization. Every illustration below was drawn in the browser, in code.
Drawn from the field
Five plates, each inked with the wobble of a real pen and the anatomy of a real animal — toe discs, parotoid glands, gill fringe, the dark embryo inside the jelly.
Plate I
Tree frog Hylidae — arboreal
Plate II
True toad Bufonidae — terrestrial
Plate III
Tadpole larval stage
Plate IV
Spotted salamander Caudata — tailed
Plate V
Egg clutch the beginning
Everything below is connected
Beneath a healthy pond runs a hidden web — roots, rootlets and threads of water braiding through the mud. Scroll, and it grows the way it grows in the field: a bold trunk first, then finer and finer children reaching for the light. Every branch here is drawn live, one segment at a time.
A frog, annotated
The working parts of an amphibian, numbered as a plate should be.
- Eye. Set high on the head, giving a frog a wide field of view above the waterline while it hides below.
- Dorsolateral ridge. The raised glandular fold running down each side of the back — a field mark that separates look-alike species.
- Nostril. Paired openings at the snout; frogs draw air by pumping the floor of the mouth.
- Tympanum. The external eardrum, a bare disc just behind the eye. Its size often reveals whether a frog is male or female.
- Webbed hind foot. Skin stretched between the long toes turns each back leg into a paddle for swimming.
- Skin. Amphibians breathe partly through their skin — which is exactly why pollution in the water reaches them first.
Four lives in one
Few animals rebuild themselves as completely as a frog. It begins in jelly and ends on land, rewriting its own body along the way.
Stage 01
Egg
A dark embryo develops inside a clear, swelling capsule of jelly.
Stage 02
Tadpole
A gilled, aquatic larva with a finned tail and no legs at all.
Stage 03
Froglet
Hind legs sprout, front legs follow, and the tail is slowly absorbed.
Stage 04
Adult frog
Lungs, long jumping legs, and a life lived between water and land.
Why we keep this journal
Amphibians are among the most threatened animals on Earth, and they cannot speak for themselves. SAVE THE FROGS! exists to give them a voice — through education, conservation and a global community that turns out every spring for the frogs.