Frogs

Ok, maybe not back to the manly rugby posts, but more boyish at least...I like frogs. I have been fond of frogs forever. While I delve into my love of frogs, I'll interweave my general love of nature.

As a kid how wonderful it was to go on nature hikes with my mother, taking time to look at tadpoles and trying to catch frogs. Of course snakes were cool too, so I can't leave out the story my mother loves to share about the time she picked up a rock, saw a snake, screamed, quickly dropped the rock, and had me begging her to lift the rock back up so that I could see the snake. My love of nature for certain was my mother's doing.

From my earliest memories, my mom was always taking us to the parks, farms, zoos, etc. We would frequent places like Winton Woods, Farbach-Werner Nature Preserve, Fantasy Farm, the Cincinnati Zoo, Krohn Conservatory, and farms where we would drink cider, pick berries, or get a pumpkin. As my mom was actively involved in a gardening club and Girl Scouts, I had even more opportunities for hiking and camping at the various parks and nature preserves (Yes, yes, I tagged along with my mom and sister on Girl Scout activities).

My favorite magazine growing up was Ranger Rick and eventually I graduated to a World Wildlife Fund magazine. I was inspired by a book I read about Teddy Roosevelt (one of my favorite presidents), and had my personal natural history museum in my room, complete with rocks and minerals, fossils, snake skins, insects, drawings, and nature books. My mother was kind enough to build me a nice display area and was always very encouraging. But before you label me an environmental extremist, know that while I love trees, I also believe in using the resources (wisely of course) that God has given us. This means I conserve and recycle, but also support more domestic oil drilling, and would never spare an endangered salmon at the cost of the lives of brave forest fire fighters.

Anyway enough of that and back to frogs...I remember my first frog was a bull frog that grew to over12" long. He lived in the pond in our backyard. Unfortunately our concrete pond, believe it or not, was too pristine and didn't have enough dirt in the bottom for my poor frog to survive the hash winter temperatures in Cincinnati, alas he froze, and I cried...but lesson learned.

I know that at least on one occasion my mom sent away for mail order tadpoles. I don't know if they were part of the mail order, but once I had two leopard frog tadpoles that I kept in a jar in my room. I enjoyed watching them transform into frogs. Unfortunately, I didn't have a net over the large jar they were in and when the first one reached froghood it jumped out. I left a pan of water under my bed, and I begged my sister to help search for it. Several months later I found its dried corpse under my sister's bed, and I of course blamed her for the tragedy and it took a good while for me to forgive her. Of course I now rightly blame myself for letting it get out in the first place, and I don't know for sure that she didn't search. Again lesson learned.

A few years back my wife learned of this cool environmental project called Frog Watch. We went to a meeting where we learned all the different frog calls and were then assigned a local pond to watch. On a weekly basis we would go to the pond and make an account of all the different frogs we heard (mainly spring peepers), and perhaps even listed how many we heard. We always loved to hear what my wife calls the "bully bull frogs," with their deep guttural, truly cow like call. Anyway great fun, I highly recommend it.