Talking blues and bullfrogs: The wonder and variety of the rare blue variant in bullfrogs

The golden eye coloration in a blue morph of a bullfrog, this one found in DuPage County.

Bruce Vang photographed a frog with vivid blue legs last week while fishing and asked if I ``ever came across a bullfrog of this color?’’

I had not, even though frogs have been part of my life from my younger years to raising our kids. His question led me down one of those good winding paths.

Bruce Vang found this blue-variant bullfrog last week while fishing.

Tadpoles and bullfrogs are the great gateway to the natural world, true across generations and for men and women both.

My dad worked quarries much of his life. Many things came in 50-gallon drums. Dad sometimes cut a barrel in half with an acetylene cutting torch, then brought it home. My younger brother and I cleaned them meticulously, then stockpiled tadpoles in various stages and watched them become frogs, later releasing them.

I forwarded Vang’s question to my frog people, who noted it was an American bullfrog.

``This is a rare color variant of the bullfrog,’’ responded Chris Phillips, curator of amphibians and reptiles for the Illinois Natural History Survey. ``I’ve only seen a few pictures of these, but usually the entire body is blue-green.’’

Allison Sacerdote-Velat, curator of herpetology at the Chicago Academy of Sciences/Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, expanded on that.

``We tend to see some in the region with a blue color mutation, likely a recessive trait,’’ she emailed. ``It’s interesting because sometimes they are blue throughout the back of the body and legs, and other times it is just visible in patches of the body (legs, sides, etc).’’

She attached photos she had taken in DuPage County.

``They tend to have very golden eye coloration in the blue morph,’’ she noted. ``I am aware of the color morph showing up in southern Cook, DuPage, and Lee counties, but it may be more widespread.’’

A blue-variant bullfrog from DuPage County.

WILD THINGS

Mulberries are ripe and dropping.

A bowl of mulberries picked this week in Chicago.

ILLINOIS HUNTING

Impacts of our cold wet spring continue. Only 92 percent of corn and 79 percent of the soybeans were planted statewide by Sunday, according to the Crop Progress Report.

READING

Dean Kuipers, author of ``The Deer Camp,’’ will talk and do a book signing at City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, at 6:30 p.m. Friday. For more details, go to https://www.citylitbooks.com/event/author-reading-deer-camp-dean-kuipers.

STRAY CAST

Terri Hemmert is to my radio listening what Rick Clunn is to my bass-fishing viewing. (Hemmert and Clunn never shared a sentence before.)