It had been five years since the first of the frog eggs had been moved, carefully plucked from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula and transported by cooler to Southern California. Anny Peralta-Garcia was getting nervous. The eggs belonged to California red-legged frogs, an amphibian that had been eaten, bulldozed and eventually pushed out of the state decades earlier. Peralta-Garcia, an Ensenada-based conservation biologist, had helped harvest fresh eggs from a pond in Baja. The efforts to move them back to the frogs’ historic range in California had been monumental — involving private landowners, federal agencies, conservation groups, helicopters and an international border. And now, 87 more moved egg masses later, everyone was waiting to see if it worked. If the re-introduced frogs were breeding.

Other endangered species news:

• The Nevada Independent: Central Nevada farmers, conservationist square off in battle between water and a rare fish
• Center for Biological Diversity: News release: Court blocks Northern California development in vernal pool landscape