Recently my daughter and her friend found this little frog in the backyard. I think it is a Yule Island Tree Frog Litoria congenita. I’m relying on text and pics in James Menzies, Frogs of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Pensoft Press, 2006 for the ID. According to Menzies this frog is common in seasonally dry woodlands and suburban gardens in southern Papua New Guinea from sea level to 500m. It is quite a small frog (35-40mm) and is a beautiful brown and gold in colour. The pattern is said to be quite variable – with 1-3 dorsal stripes and a white ventrum. Males have a black pigmented throat so this should be a female. Yule Island is a small island off the southern coast of Papua New Guinea about 160km west of Port Moresby and that is where the first specimens were apparently collected. The species was described by Wilhelm Peters and Giacomo Doria in 1878. The paper is in Italian: “Catalogo dei rettili e dei batraci raccolti da O. Beccari, L.M. D’Albertis e A.A. Bruijn nella sotto-regione Austro-Malese” which seems to indicate that the first specimens were collected by either Odoardo Beccari, Luigi Maria d’Albertis, or Antonie Augustus Bruijn.
An Amateur Naturalist in PNG 