How about Wireless Headphones for your TV watching. ;)

Paula,

I don't know of anything you can do short of importing some sort of predator to eat them, and I don't really think you want to do that. Sorry, I wish I could help but I just don't know of any way to do it.

When we first moved here, we thought we'd sleep with the windows open. HA HA--the joke was on us. We soon learned that the frogs make such a racket in April and May that you can't do that. We have not only the tree frogs but all kinds of pond frogs, including the big old bullfrogs with the very deep voices. I love to sit outside and listen to them in the evenings, but they'll keep you awake if you try to sleep with the windows open.

About the time the tree frogs and other frogs start to relax a bit and croak less at night, the crickets and locusts and such start up. It is amazing how loud the wild things are in spring, summer and early fall.

My least favorite tree frog is the one whose call sounds like a woman screaming some distance away. The first time I heard one of those after we moved here, I was home alone and was terrified....it sounded like a woman was screaming on our property. I called DH and he said 'it's a tree frog". Of course, he was right, but sometimes their sound still disturbs me because it still sounds like a woman is out there screaming.

I like the Wireless Headphone idea...but then it might be hard for you and DH to talk to one another...and y'all haven't been married to one another long enough yet to have 'run out' of conversation topics.

Dawn

It's a good thing, considering the decline of amphibian populations that is happening worldwide. Or, perhaps amphibians all over the world are just moving to Lake Thunderbird?? ;)

-Matt

Here is a link that might be useful: Declining Amphibian Populations

It's kind of funny. When we were having our first child, we bought a CD of frogs singing as a calming background noise. We have two ponds about 500 feet from our house, and get a similar effect now.

Egads, I'm there with ya, Paula. We have bazillions of tree frogs... and other frogs... and crickets... and every noisemaking critter on the planet, I think. It doesn't bother me when it's time for sleep but it can get so loud that it hurts my ears when I work outside.

Diane

Paula, I understand it. I do. We've been known to ask one another "Have they ever been this loud before?" The answer is always "Yes!".

Matt, Believe me, we appreciate having them, and we ensure they stay by not using any lawn chemicals whose runoff can hurt them. (We have used Roundup but never remotely close to the ponds because of its effect on amphibians.) I just wish they'd "shut up" every now and then.

Earthy, We have one of those sound machines and like it, but the 'frog song' and 'rain shower' on those machines are about 1/1000th as loud as our real frog songs here and OK rain showers, which tend to be raging beast type thunderstorms instead of gentle spring rain showers.

At our house, we have five ponds and three creeks, and the 4 closest ponds are within 100 or 125' of the house, and the closest is a backyard lily pond about 20' from our bedroom window. Add in the 10 acres of trees with their treefrogs and we're overpopulated with frogs. I love them all, but I'd be just as happy if we had about 10,000 less of them. There are worse noise problems to have though, and I'm grateful our worst noise problem is only frogs.

We only had a few frogs the first couple of years here, so clearly we've created and are maintaining an environment they like. That's a good thing because, in general, the more wildlife the better. It is just that sometimes the racket they make is loud enough to keep you awake.

Dawn

My daughter will gladly come to your house and box them all up and bring them home!

-Laura

The only thing I can think of is to get rid of the trees and I don't think that's really an option!

Paula

Count your blessings, I have lost most of my hearing and would be glad to have your problem. I also use wireless head phones, but for a different reason. I also use foam ear plugs around high noise to help save what little hearing I have left. Try the foam ear plugs, they are cheap and not all that bad to wear. If you use a mower or power tools they would help there also.

Larry

Laura,

When my DH's best friend's son was about 4, 5 and 6-years-old, he loved coming to our house because it was always an adventure. He could (and did) watch the frogs in and around the pond forever and he loved collecting eggs in the chicken coop and 'hunting' ripe watermelons in the garden. He's older now, and we don't see him as much as we used to, but we have some great frog-watching memories.

Tigerdawn, Well, we are getting rid of the cedars little by little, but that doesn't seem to affect the frogs. I think we'd have tree frogs even without the trees. They come up to the house and hang on the windows, the walls, etc. They get in my large containers of plants. They hang out on the side of the barn, on the wall shaded by the patio cover. I suppose they could adapt to life without trees if they had to.

Larry, Thanks for the reminder to count our blessings. I think it is easy for us to forget what a gift it is to be able to hear the frogs.

Dawn

Amen....

thanks for the reminder, Larry. And you know, that's just what I needed. Their screeching isn't bothering me at all tonite.

Paula

Yes! I have those Jurassic Park screaming frogs this summer and I share your pain. This is the first summer I have had them and it's maddening! On July 4, I noticed that the neighborhood fireworks made them come onto my deck and into my pool, maybe the noise? I managed to capture 3 of them and my husband relocated them to a wooded creek area where he golfs.

Given all of that, this is my plan of attack:

1. Fire those Roman candle fireworks towards the trees that I hear them in.

2. Sit in wait with my net and jar, capture them if they come onto my deck or into my pool.

3. Have hubby relocate them to golf course.

Wish me luck. I will update this post in about a week with the outcome.

V. Diane

Diane, I wish you luck. Tree frogs are going to control a lot of your life if you don't learn to live with them. If you do catch a few frogs, I will trade you some very quite deer for them.

Larry

Diane, I meant to write "quiet", that is the only type of deer I have.

Larry

Diane, I know they can be annoying, but we are happy to have them nevertheless. I'd rather listen to frogs (even the ones that sound like ladies screaming) than to the endless drone of cicadas.

Our last good frog year was 2010 and there's been so many drought years since then that I wasn't sure if the frog population ever would recover. Obviously it has recovered just fine. I have them all over the garden where they are great garden helpers and eat tons of bugs, as do the turtles roaming around in the garden.

Larry, You just can't get rid of those deer, can you? I know they are bothersome and eat lots of plants, but I love them anyway. I can't help it. We moved here to the country to live surrounded by nature, and we got even more than we bargained for.

Dawn

I love my frogs!!! Diane, enjoy them, when they disappear you will miss them. I know they can get loud but I,still love me.

Getting a real giggle out of the resurrection of this thread!!! While out in the garden this evening just at dusk - they were winding up and getting loud. Funny thing....they don't bother me so much anymore after years of drought and deafening quiet. Guess that's part of the cycle of life!!!! (says the person that 5 years ago was complaining!)

lol, Paula.

That is just what I was thinking when this thread was resurrected! I was wondering if everyone else had missed the frogs as much as I had after far too many quiet years.

Long ago, probably in the summer of 2006, after southern OK had suffered through the drought years of the early 2000s (except for 2004) and especially the drought of 2005-06, we had a summer rainstorm. We sat out under the covered patio and watched the frogs come out of the lily pond and hop all over from puddle to puddle while it was still raining. I think we got almost 4" that day in just a couple of hours. After the rain, still sitting under the patio cover (and listening on our fire radios to firefighters at the north end of the county fighting a haybarn fire starting, unfortunately, by lightning) we watched a rainbow appear and we watched the frogs for an hour or two. A few days later, everyone in our neighborhood was out frantically trying to catch up on mowing and trimming, and we often stopped for conversations with passers-by while mowing down by the road. At such times, our road is more like a sidewalk.....

The funny thing was that when we compared notes on the rainy day, we found that other neighbors also were sitting on porches and covered patios, watching the frogs. It was too funny. We poked fun at ourselves for watching the frogs..."you might be a redneck if....you sit in the rain and watch the frogs play", etc., but the truth was that the frogs that day were a symbol of so many things---how horrible the droughts had been and how we finally had hope the drought would break being just two of those things. As it turned out, true drought relief was a few more months away, but the heavy rainfall and frogs that came out to play that day still served as a sign that good times would return. Sometimes in the midst of awful drought, frogs are such a good, positive sign that some sort of normalcy has returned. That's how I feel this year---things are so much more normal, weatherwise, than they have been in ages.

Dawn

We open our windows at night, with the air conditioner on, so that we can enjoy the screeches of our gray tree frogs at night. They make me feel like a very small part of God's glorious creation. I'm. ruinous why they seem to go away and then begin screeching again after a good rain. Spring is so wonderful!! Love hearing life's sounds!

I love hearing nature's sounds too, but in a good year when there's tons of frogs here, we have to close the windows in order to sleep or the frog noise will keep us awake all night long. Sometimes too many frogs making too much of a racket still is just too much. I loved leaving the windows open at night to listen to the frogs when we first moved here, but it eventually became too much noise at times.

We've had over 5" of rain just this week, and the frogs are happy and very loud. I like hearing them during the daytime, but not so much when we are sleeping. It's about to get hot enough here in OK that sleeping with the windows open won't even be an option anyhow because the air conditioners will be running.

The summer sound that drives me crazy is the endless drone of grasshoppers, crickets and cicadas all night long. That gets pretty old pretty fast.

My hearing is so bad these days that I can close my eyes and pretend I'm listening to cicadas, which makes it more tolerable for me. I like cicada sounds. I also love the tree frogs and I love the sound of my livestock guardian dogs when they patrol at night. It makes me feel that things are secure. For me, it's not the noise level but how I interpret what I hear, that determines if it bothers me.

In spite of visits by a blue heron our bullfrogs are coming back in the pond. I believe this is because we lost our grass carp and the weeds are getting thick.

Our bullfrogs were croaking this morning when I went outside to take care of all the animals. I love that sound, and really miss it in drought years.

We have had over 5" of rain just this week, and had plenty last week, so every pasture, part of the garden, the entire yard, and most of the driveway are now ponds and there's little tiny turtles and frogs all over the place. I guess they'll go back to the big ponds and the creeks when all the new, temporary ponds dry up.