Race Against Time: Tiny Frog's Last Stand in Cape Town's Urban Wetlands

CAPE TOWN - Matthew van der Bijl spends most of his working days at a computer. But on a winter evening at Kenilworth Race Course, he stands in the dark with a flashlight, scanning wetland grass for movement no bigger than a fingernail.

What he and dozens of others have come to find is the South African micro frog, an endangered creature so small it is easy to overlook entirely. The twilight guided tour, organized by environmental education group Nature Connect, brings residents into a 52-hectare wetland sitting improbably in the middle of one of Cape Town’s most urban spaces. For van der Bijl, the experience offers something essential. “I think we’re really privileged in Cape Town where within 20 minutes you can get to a place like this where after a long day at work you can kind of just switch off,” he says.

The micro frog, also known as the Cape Flats Frog, occupies a singular place in the natural world. Julian Alex Nieto Lawrence, a herpetologist with amphibian conservation group Anura Africa, explains its irreplaceable status. “The micro frog is a unique species because, for one, it is the smallest frog in South Africa, but it also has no sister species. It’s the only species within its genus which makes it incredibly unique and very irreplaceable,” he says.

That isolation carries real weight. “Often you have these wetlands with lots of sister species that fill similar ecological roles but this frog doesn’t have those. If this frog were to go extinct then there would be no functional replacement for it.”

The frogs’ numbers are declining, according to the IUCN, a group of international conservationists. Winter is when the males call out, allowing females to locate them and breed. For the rest of the year, they hibernate. Once the micro frog inhabited wetlands across the Western Cape region. Today, the race track conservation area represents their last remaining stronghold.

The frog is not alone in this urban refuge. Braden Ingram, a training officer with Nature Connect, describes the broader ecosystem sharing the space. “We have about 11 different types of amphibians, about 27 different types of mammals that we have, and about 110 or so different bird species that come and visit this site,” he says. The list includes baboon spiders, Cape sand frogs, Cape burrowing scorpions, and Cape dwarf chameleons. Surrounded by mountains and two oceans, Cape Town contains pockets of habitat that residents might not expect to find within city limits.

Meanwhile, Fayruz Prins, an assistant conservation officer for Nature Connect, points to what these spaces mean for people who live nearby. “They don’t have to leave Cape Town to experience wildlife. There’s so much wildlife literally in the city. And these little pockets of habitat basically gives people the opportunity to come to nature reserves,” she says.

The conservation area is privately owned and managed by the race track company and Nature Connect. Efforts are underway to designate it as an official nature reserve, a step that would ensure easier public access and stronger legal protections for the micro frog and the many other species depending on this habitat.

Whether that designation comes through in time to matter is the question hanging over every winter tour, every flashlight sweeping the grass, every faint call rising out of the dark.