a closer look

BUTLER, Ga. The first day of February, John Jensen peered into the murk of a pond that was recently nothing but a mud flat. Last spring it dried up in Georgia's record drought, stranding the tadpoles of rare gopher frogs.

"It was a puddle of really warm water with wading birds just picking them off," said Jensen, the state herpetologist. "The next week it was just cracked mud and carcasses."

Jensen recently searched the pond at the Fall Line Sand Hills Natural Area for frog eggs among golden grasses waving gently underwater. There were none yet. But he spotted a few leopard frog tadpoles, and ornate chorus frogs called from the bank with a sound like sonar blips.

Although the pond filled in the past month, it remains lower than usual. Jensen fears that even if gopher frogs have another good breeding season, without heavy rains the tadpoles will die in the sun again.

Gopher frogs aren't the only ones suffering. The record Georgia drought has harmed some of Georgia's most endangered and threatened species. The number of endangered wood stork nests dropped by almost half last year.

Biologists believe endangered flatwoods salamanders have spent years unable to breed. And rare fish must dangerously rub fins with their predators in shrunken rivers.

State wildlife officials say many species likely have taken a hit, but most are expected to recover rapidly unless the drought continues several more years.

Still, human changes to Georgia's natural landscape may cause droughts to have a greater effect on animals than in the past.

The state purchased the Fall Line Sand Hills Natural Area in 2006 mostly to protect the fishless ponds, which are an amphibian oasis.

They host not only gopher frogs but also newts and salamanders that are among the only amphibians in the United States that can choose either lungs or gills as adults. On the banks grow Georgia's largest stand of endangered pondberry.

But the habitat disappears along with the water.

As long as an adult breeding population remains, animals can survive a few years without breeding success.

Most frogs, and some turtles, migrate upland and burrow among leaf litter during dry weather, Jensen said. The barking tree frog hides in hollow trees.

"A one-season issue is just a blip and happens all the time," Jensen said. "Extended dry conditions lasting seven or eight years is a compounding problem." He also said conditions have mostly been dryer than normal since about 2000, during the last drought.

The growth of the human population makes the effect worse.

"There have probably been local extinctions," Jensen said. "In the past when we had a fairly continuous natural landscape, there would be adjacent populations that would eventually reoccupy these areas. But we just don't have that connectivity now."