ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, DEREK GALON
Luke Jones spent the early evening of July 12 last year crouched in several inches of dusty ash in a secluded region of Montserrat’s tropical dry forest. After gently unzipping three nylon tents and laying their flaps flat to the ground, the program coordinator for Mountain Chicken Reintroduction and his team waited silently in a moonlit clearing for hordes of giant frogs to leap to freedom.
After 30 minutes of waiting, it became clear that the frogs, commonly known as mountain chickens (Leptodactylus fallax), were not going to emerge in the triumphant cavalry the researchers had anticipated. It had been 10 years since the amphibians’ ancestors had lived on the Caribbean island; the frogs in the tents were more accustomed to small biosecure homes in Jersey and London Zoos in the UK than to the 25-square-meter, semi-wild enclosure waiting for them outside. When rustling the ...
