Creatures and Features: Frogs/Pepeketua

The frogs in the Hauraki District are small, nocturnal and hard to see as they camouflage themselves well. Two of our three native species, Archey's and Hamilton's frog, live on land in shady, moist forested areas, and the Horchstetter's frog is semi-aquatic, living on stream edges.

New Zealand's native frogs have several distinctive features that make them very different from frogs elsewhere in the world:

• they have no external eardrum
• they have round (not slit) eyes
• they don't croak regularly like most frogs.