Nature Next Door
A tiny pond surrounded by Bend Oregon’s urban landscape entices a vanishing frog, and the people seeking to save it.
An unassuming little drainage pond nestles between a yoga studio and and a housing complex along the Deschutes River in downtown Bend, Oregon. Bikers, dog walkers, and families using the adjacent sidewalks and trails often pass by without a second glance. But peer into the reeds on a warm spring afternoon and you just might catch the gaze of the rare aquatic resident that decided to move in—surprising locals and scientists alike.
Knock knock
Who’s there?
It’s the Oregon spotted frog.
Listen for the knocking.
Can you hear the knocking? Amidst the constant background noise of civilization, from cars driving to sirens blaring and people chatting, the call of this rare amphibian is easy to miss.
Uncovering A Natural Treasure
Living with the pond at their backdoor, retired couple Bob and Pat Fulton would be the first in the neighborhood of twenty-two waterfront homes to meet their quiet neighbor next door.
“As we were living here, you know, we began absorbing more and more of what was happening in the pond,” Bob said. “It’s just a little treasure.”
Bob and Pat always gravitated toward living near the water, previously on houseboats and near coastlines. They moved to downtown Bend seven years ago to be closer to restaurants, entertainment and community activities, but they were excited to have nature still in view of their home. And they didn’t realize just how full of life this “bio-swale,” essentially a man-made ditch for diverting water runoff, would be.
Each spring since moving in, once the weather warms and mornings are no longer frigid, the couple starts their day by checking on the ducklings swimming amidst the canary grass and the red-wing blackbirds hopping between cattails poking up around the pond. They can point you to the muskrat’s burrow and offer binoculars to spot the blackbirds’ nests from their own second-story perch.
“Last year there was one mother duck with five ducklings. And we would just come out here in the evenings and just sit here and watch her with them, always protecting them, you know, if someone walked along the bank with a dog she would rustle her five little ducklings right into the reeds, so they were protected and out of sight. It’s just fascinating.” — Pat Fulton
To protect the “nursery,” as Pat calls it, the couple quickly became the pond’s self-appointed guardians, approaching potentially disruptive or curious visitors (which is how we met) and ensuring the local turtle makes it safely across the busy road whenever they spot it out and about.
“I feel I can get in on it because I’m the neighbor—the nextdoor neighbor,” Bob said.
“It’s my God-given right,” he laughed.
Bob and Pat Fulton are “avid cheer leaders” of restoration efforts across Central Oregon. They lean over a map of the Eastern Cascade Mountains to pinpoint Whychus Creek, a riparian area they’ve witnessed be restored by the Deschutes Land Trust over the past quarter century. They are also involved in Think Wild, which is a hospital and sanctuary for injured birds and small animals in Bend.
Light from nearby homes and buildings illuminates the pond after dusk on a spring evening.
Bob and Pat grew increasingly concerned for the pond as the waterfront grew busier each year. When they first moved to the area thirty years ago, the town had about 30,000 residents. Today the population is over 100,000, and the outdoor tourism hub ranks as one of the top 100 fastest-growing communities in America.
Now, more bike riders and dog walkers frequent the narrow path separating the little oasis from the Deschutes River, and inner tubers and paddlers criss cross the river like a highway. With increased recreation and housing demand, Bob and Pat worried the little pond would be turned into the latest brewery or apartment complex.
On a warm late May morning, the waterfront buzzes with activity.
“We found out no one can build there because it’s protected,” Bob remembers. “Why is it protected? Well, it’s got this Oregon spotted frog, this threatened species.”
Learn more about the pond’s history
From Timber to Tourism to Protected Habitat
The pond, called the Old Mill Pond or “casting pond” by locals, has a long history. It’s located near the historic “Farewell Bend” of the Deschutes River, a horseshoe-like curve that years ago created the perfect shallow conditions for crossing the river by wagon and for friends and family to wave “farewell.”
The area is the traditional homelands of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Wascoes, and Paiutes. When Bend officially became a city in 1904, with fewer than a thousand residents, a burgeoning demand for wood meant the boom of timber production in Central Oregon, which has had lasting effects on the river that runs through the region.
The old log pond that held logs for production with Shevlin-Hixon mill billowing smoke behind. Source: Deschutes Historical Museum
The Old Mill District is the present-day reminder of this era. Smoke stacks indicate that the building that now houses an REI used to be a wood production mill. Two competing mills that opened in the 1910s, Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon, used the river both for hydropower and for timber storage.
The Colorado Avenue dam, now hardly noticeable as you drive across the river, created the original log pond. Logging operations in the ponderosa forests to the south dropped logs into the river, and they’d float down to the mill to process. In the early years, the mills would process enough wood to build thirty homes each day.
The lumber yard of Brooks Scanlon Mill stored finished wood product. Source: Deschutes Historical Museum
The town grew quickly, but the logging industry declined as trees ran out and demand dwindled. In 1950, Brooks-Scanlon bought out its competitor and the remaining mill remained open until 1994.
Bob had been visiting the area since first driving through in 1961, headed to his sister’s wedding in California. Back then, the roads were made of lava rock, and signs warned “slippery when wet.”
In the 1980s, Bob spent more time in Bend for skiing until he permanently moved to the area from Seattle. He witnessed the major logging town visibly in decline, and he saw a need for a shift from timber to something new.
“When the doors closed on the old sawmill, Bend was up for grabs,” says Bob. “It was a bargain basement.”
“Old Bend” growth from 1913, 1917, and 1928. Source: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
After the mill closed, William Smith purchased the waterfront property. He envisioned creating a place for the public to enjoy the river while commemorating the city’s timber roots. The result was a bustling hub downtown for shopping, dining and entertainment that, if you stop to read the signs or look at the architecture, shares the story of Bend’s timber past.
When William bought the property, though, the little pond as it looks today didn’t exist. After constructing new buildings and creating connected paths along the waterfront, Smith Properties had to send excess water somewhere. So they dug out the little side property to hold water runoff.
The name casting pond originated more than a decade later when the District opened the first fly fishing casting course in the world throughout the grounds in 2009. A gravel island was added to the pond at the time to offer anglers a place to practice their technique.
But, when frogs were found in the area a few years later, Smith Properties removed the pond from the course.
As it turns out, the property owners worked with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to come to a 20-year voluntary conservation agreement in 2014. While there’s no signage, the area is now essentially protected habitat – Smith Properties maintains the water levels, removes excess grasses and cattails, and monitors the frogs annually.
“He says, ‘This is the spotted frog, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘yeah, where’d you get that?’ He said, ‘down there at the Casting Pond.’ It was like woah, we didn’t even know they were here!” — Jay Bowerman
Spotting the First Frog
“We learned about the frog from a young man here in Bend,” Jay Bowerman said, looking out at the pond last April as it just began its annual transition from the brown-gray hues of winter to the vibrant green signs of spring.
Jay is a renowned Central Oregon naturalist and one of the leading researchers on the Oregon spotted frog. You might also recognize his last name, as he’s the son of Bill Bowerman, the legendary University of Oregon track coach and co-founder of Nike.
Despite living in Bend and frequenting the waterfront himself, he never suspected to find this threatened species at the pond. He had been studying the amphibian for more than a decade, sometimes hiking into remote marshy wetlands to reach them. Then a photo of a very large spotted frog was sent to him by a friend.
It turned out, Brett Judish, his friend’s young nephew, was “one of those kids that just loved looking at stuff” and had come across the frog while exploring the pond. He had also found a Western pond turtle—likely Bob and Pat’s nomadic friend—via the same participatory methods.
After seeing the frog photo, Jay called up Jennifer O’Reilly, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s lead Biologist on spotted frog conservation issues, and she and her team redirected their fieldwork downtown for a day. They caught ten frogs in the pond that afternoon and estimated about 200 total by the end of the year.
Jay looks for spotted frog egg masses in early April, 2024, outside of Bend, Oregon.
The discovery of spotted frogs downtown would affect the next decade of understanding about the species as Jay returned annually, often with upcoming herpetology students or peers in the field, to study the frogs at this unusual site.
Now, ten years later, he has a tally of how many frogs have lived in the pond each year. Because the frogs can be hard to find, it’s easiest to count them by counting the egg masses they lay during the spring. One mass equates to two frogs.
“They’re coming along pretty nicely,” Jay says, walking over to point out the embryos currently amassed in clusters. There are eleven, meaning at least twenty-two frogs this year.
Spotted frogs lay their eggs in clusters which helps them stay afloat and healthy as the embryos grow into tadpoles.
“If we get straight sunny days, they’ll hatch in seven [days] or maybe even less than that in this pond because it warms up really fast.”
Eleven egg masses are a reassuring sight. In 2016, there was only one. They’ve since bounced back, Jay theorizes, because frogs from the adjacent wetlands across the river found their way over to the pond.
The rebound is an example of a successful “recolonization,” an evolutionary advantage that keeps the frogs around, making a return even when droughts or bad winters can wipe out whole ponds full of frogs.
But when the frogs are too far away to meander back to the original pond? Jay calls that the “ratchet problem,” essentially the snowballing effect, and it’s a big threat for the frogs.
“One of those [populations] winks out, and before it gets recolonized the next one up stream winks out, you suddenly start getting greater and greater distances between them. And the opportunity then for recolonization becomes lower.”
Jay didn’t think to find spotted frogs at the pond, especially as populations had been disappearing, “winking out” as Jay calls it, across the West.
Research Begins at the Golf Course
Spotted frogs are Oregon’s most aquatic frog. They’re also Oregon’s most endangered.
They usually inhabit large marshy wetland areas with nearby streams to stay in during the winter. Unlike other frogs that burrow into the mud to maintain warmth and retain oxygen during winter months, spotted frogs don’t leave the water. According to Jay, they can survive up to seven days without oxygen—a perfect adaptation to survive when higher-elevation ponds freeze over, giving them plenty of time to find pockets of air underneath the ice.
Despite evolutionary advantages that make them uniquely capable of surviving in the West where wetlands naturally dry out and rivers change course, they’ve disappeared from more than three-quarters of their former range. They were once found across the Willamette Valley in Western Oregon and as far south as Northern California. Yet, by the early 2000s, spotted frogs lived mainly East of the Cascade Mountains.
Spotted frogs once lived in the Willamette Valley in Oregon; however, today they’re mainly found East of the Cascade Mountains. Data Sources: USFWS, ESRI
Scientists like Jay correlated the decline in large part due to habitat loss from the introduction of dams over the past century. These water control measures, while instrumental for agriculture and timber production, reshaped once-wild rivers into artificial waterways. Without natural flooding and consistent water flows, wetlands began to dry up.
The declining number of frogs during annual surveys concerned the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and, in 1998, Jay learned they were considering listing the spotted frog as a Threatened species. This designation would signify they were not quite endangered but likely to become so in the forseeable future.
At the time, Jay was living in Sunriver, a planned residential and resort community located a 20-minute drive south of Bend. Adjacent to the Deschutes River, the community is laden with golf courses and walking paths that meander across manicured nature areas.
The Spotted Frog, a waterpark cafe in Sunriver, serves burgers and salads as well as cocktails and draft beers during the summers. Open to the air, the cafe is named after the visitors that sometimes frequent the poolside. According to local-employee legend, a frog once made it to the top steps of the waterslide.
Lake Aspen, an artificial lake in Sunriver, Oregon, is home to river otters, muskrats, ducks, geese, turtles, and spotted frogs. It’s also frequented by migratory human vacationers who rent homes along the waterfront and use the paths along the shore.
From a frog’s point of view, Sunriver is basically a series of upscaled-ponds and a full-size lake reminiscent of many found in the foothills of the Cascades.
Jay had seen so many spotted frogs around the grounds that he thought they were common. He originally moved to the area in 1973, after serving in the military and before winning sixth in the team biathlon at the 1972 Olympics in Japan, to help create cross-country skiing paths for the resort community.
When an opportunity opened to be the director of Sunriver’s Nature Center, Jay stayed for good. There he would lead nature walks, run educational events for children, and help coordinate the preservation of nature areas across the community. In 1998, when the Fish and Wildlife Service announced the frog’s predicament, he saw a perfect opportunity.
“Because I knew we had a big population of them, I just started tracking the frogs,” Jay said.
Jay checks on spotted frog eggs in the marshy meadows of Sunriver, Oregon, in early spring and finds the eggs have begun to transition into tadpoles.
Jay developed a novel live-trapping technique and refined the egg mass surveying at Sunriver. And, as it turns out, the artificially-influenced environment is home to one of the largest and most stable populations of Oregon spotted frogs. In 2011, they counted 1,480 egg masses—almost 3,000 frogs at home next to the fancy resort pools and themed shopping mall.
To keep the frog habitat in prime shape, the Owner’s Association uses three water control weirs, small barriers that redirect water from the Deschutes River to the resort property, to keep the large fields from drying out in the winter. Without the intervention, due to the dam upstream that raises water levels in the summer and lowers them in the winter, the wetlands would dry out seasonally.
Despite benefitting from community-supported home maintenance, the spotted frogs were soon up against another threat. In 2008, Jay found every semi-aquatic ecosystem’s environmental nemesis: the bullfrog.
Jay paddles across the Upper Deschutes river. He’s wearing a shirt a student mentee made for him years ago. “Bullfrogs are my night gig,” the print reads. Gigging is a method of bullfrog eradication.
An Unwelcome Guest Arrives
Bullfrogs, native to the Eastern United States, were introduced to the area in the 1920s, both accidentally while stocking fish and potentially purposefully for game-hunting.
Compared to the spotted frog, they’re massive. They can weigh up to a pound and will eat insects, fish, and, according to Jay, even gophers. Spotted frogs are high on the menu.
Listen to the mating call of a male bullfrog.
While Jay had found bullfrogs in Sunriver as early as 1974, it was usually one every couple of years. The area remained a “bullfrog-free zone” for 30 years.
However, in the summer of 2008, hundreds of bullfrogs moved in from a population up stream. Jay tried to catch them but didn’t reach them all.
In 2015, after the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the frogs as Threatened, the Owner’s Association began an eradication campaign that would become an annual program. In 2017 alone, Jay and volunteers removed more than 5,000 bullfrogs from Lake Aspen, the artificial lake in Sunriver.
But what do you do with thousands of invasive frogs?
Jodi Wilmoth, a contracted bullfrog hunter who works up and down the Deschutes basin, has a system.
“I have a giant bullfrog chest freezer,” Jodi peels back the frozen-stiff Amazon shipping bag. Inside are rigidly posed frogs.
“My boyfriend doesn’t want me putting them in the compost because they stink, so I freeze them,” Jodi says. “And then on garbage day they go in the garbage.”
Jodi got started bullfrog hunting through Jay. She moved to Three Rivers, an unincorporated community five miles south of Sunriver, so around 22 miles from Bend, back in 2012.
With a degree in molecular biology, she worked in the pharmaceutical industry interspersed with seasonal gigs in Alaska before starting at a biotech company that year in Bend. But in 2016 she quit to pursue a career in conversation.
And that’s how she met Jay—she’d heard his name in conservation circles for years.
“I basically stalked Jay Bowerman until he invited me to the Nature Center and let me start volunteering with them. He was the beginning, like he is for a lot of people.”
Fast forward to being accosted by gnats, walking through a marsh, grabbing slimy frogs late one summer night in 2017.
“It’s a little intimidating, especially because you spot them with your headlamp, and you see their eyes shine.”
That night, Jodi and a partner caught 1,027 bullfrogs. That’s more than one frog every minute for six hours.
One female bullfrog can lay 20,000 eggs that can hatch within two days. That makes the window to catch ready-to-lay females, with a large protruding belly, quite short.
A Tale of Two Rivers
Since that summer, Jodi has expanded her bullfrog hunting grounds. She now works at sites along the Little Deschutes, a tributary that feeds into the Upper Deschutes a few miles before it passes by Sunriver.
The split in the river is also the split between good versus not-so-good frog habitats. Along the main channel of the Deschutes, the construction of Wickiup Reservoir in 1949 changed the hydrology of the river. The Upper Deschutes no longer floods its banks or cuts new paths in the terrain which are foundational natural processes for riparian ecosystems.
Wickiup Reservoir, about a third full in July 2023, releases water into the Upper Deschutes River.
The Little Deschutes, on the other hand, remained a twisting and turning, largely free-flowing river. This difference is visible in the oxbow sloughs and wet prairies that abound along its banks today.
These wetlands types are classified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as either emergent, meaning with few tall plants, or as forested or shrub wetlands, indicating small bushes have taken root. Spotted frogs thrive in these environments, especially the open waters of emergent wetlands.
Jay, leading a survey in 1999, paddled along the Little Deschutes looking for spotted frogs. Compared to the Upper Deschutes, where spotted frog populations are almost nonexistent, they found frogs almost every half mile.
Source: USFWS National-Wetlands-Inventory
However, while the Little Deschutes supports many spotted frogs, bullfrogs also thrive in these wetland environments. The interconnected ecosystems allow them to hop between private properties, a challenge for Jodi who must contend with not only too many bullfrogs to catch but also the politics of land ownership.
“Most of the land around the big Deschutes is federally owned. It’s all Forest Service,” Jodi said. “However, the Little Deschutes is almost entirely privately owned, so that makes conservation efforts and restoration efforts on that river challenging.”
Watch the dark waters of the Little Deschutes swirl as it merges into the Upper Deschutes River.
Backdropped by Crosswater Golf Course and estate homes on all sides, the Little Deschutes merges waters with the Upper Deschutes to flow north, past Sunriver and Bend on its way to join the Columbia.
Jodi needs permission to access the ponds and sloughs in people’s backyards. She and her team work at night, when the frogs are easiest to spot, but also when it’s most alarming to see a headlamp flashing in your backyard.
To avoid the cops being called on her—again—Jodi focuses on informing and collaborating with homeowners. Through Deschutes County, she finds property owners’ names and starts a conversation the old-fashioned way: by post.
“I write letters to these landowners and believe it or not, a lot of them call me back.”
Since sending her first letter in 2018, more than thirty locals, including billionaires, cattle ranchers, and “regular people,” have signed off on her frog efforts, which Jodi attributes to a passion for protecting nature in their own neighborhood.
“It’s not just the frogs; they’re worried about the temperature of the river. They’re concerned about what’s going on upriver of them. So I started that conversation about bullfrogs. But it goes into, you know, all kinds of issues that they’re concerned about with this river.”
Despite property owners up and down river holding a wide variety of ideological views, Jodi says the river brings them together.
“These landowners have the Little Deschutes in their backyard, and they know that it’s a special little river. And many of them are very interested in what they’ve seen happen with the river, what they could do to help it.”
A Badass Conservation Crew
In order to upscale her operations since the coalition began to expand, Jodi set up a home base out of her backyard through her environmental consulting firm, 3 Rivers Environmental. She has kayaks, nets, buckets and bug spray. Since hunting alone on the Little Deschutes back in 2018, her team has grown to eight, including “five badass women.”
One evening in late August, two of her crew, Katie and Hayley, pull up in their pickup to start their night job. Loading the kayaks into the back, they take off for the river.
Arriving at the site, they dawn chest waders and apply an extra layer of bug repellent before hauling their boats over a gate and sliding them into the glossy water as stars shimmer across its surface.
The current slowly pulls the crew downstream as they bob from bank to bank, looking for the tell-tale sign of a bullfrog—the eyes.
Paddling down the Little Deschutes, the team passes by manicured lawns and fenced-in-yards as they do their nightly fieldwork.
“Reach like you’re reaching through the frog,” Hailey reiterates after catching a massive male by hand.
At the end of the night, the pair return to Jodi’s home. Transferring their haul into Wilco and Home Depot buckets, they drop off the frogs for Jodi to euthanize and add to her freezer.
“Most people are ending their day, and we’re headed out on an adventure,” Lauren, who works with Hayley, says as they head out for hunting the next evening. It’s one of the reasons she’s drawn to the work. Not only is catching bullfrogs rewarding, it’s fun.
One property, an RV resort called Thousand Trails, demonstrates how successful this bullfrog removal strategy can be.
“When I showed up, I removed 14,000 tadpoles,” Jodi said.
“I was getting so many that I had to just have this five-gallon bucket. I would count out 100 and then make a mark and then count out another 100. And then I put marks on the bucket so that I can just put them in that and know that there was 400 because I was getting so many.”
Thousand Trails offers tennis courts, outdoor pools, and a community center just a few steps away from a lively wetland ecosystem. Since bullfrog removal began five years ago, spotted frogs have returned to the property.
Located less than a mile from her home, Jodi checks on Thousand Trails often. It features a large oxbow, a pond disconnected from the main river by a half dozen yards. Before bullfrog removal began at the site, Jay hadn’t found spotted frog egg masses there for ten years. Last year, Jodi tallied 23. This year she counted 29.
“Makes me feel better about spending way too much time falling in the water, getting stuck in the mud, getting my butt kicked.”
Standing along the grassy bank, she points at a series of ripples in the water.
“Do you hear that knocking? That’s the spotted frog mating call. So there’s definitely more eggs going down here. That’s cool to hear that. You know it sounds like a wood pecker or something. Like two trees knocking together or something. And I know that if I hear that knocking, then it’s a good thing to come visit.” — Jodi Wilmoth
Looking Back
For Jodi, removing invasive species and bringing back natives is about building biodiversity and improving the river for everyone.
At a time when snowpack loss and increasing temperatures threaten water availability across the West, the spotted frog relies on friends like Jodi as well as researchers like Jay and caring neighbors like Bob and Pat.
While spotted frogs may be quiet, they aren’t shy. Crouch down and look into their golden eyes.
They’ll look back.
By Eden McCall
photographer, cinematographer, audio recorder,
writer, cartographer, designer, editor, producer.
2024