Feeding the Frog

 

I like my pond. Bill and I dug it in 1993, dropped some old carpet and a vinyl pond liner in the hole, filled it with the hose, put some fish and plants in it, and it's been going strong ever since. The original four shubunkin goldfish lived and reproduced for a couple decades, making babies that were all black, that you could hardly see in the dark water, until they all up and croaked of some disease. Well OK. That was that. I'd never wanted 70 fish in my pond, anyway.  I cleaned it out, waited awhile, and put some Comets in, and they've been hardy and friendly and most of all colorful! They have bred well but not explosively. I appreciate that.

  Twice a year, the pond's a huge pain in the butt to clean. However I have figured out how to do it without killing myself, as I was doing in this 2012 photo. I note with some satisfaction that I still don the same lime-green Columbia nylon shorts to clean it in 2019. Frugal to a fault. However now, instead of painstakingly siphoning muck off the bottom, stopping every 30 seconds to clear the clogs from the tubing, I do it ever so much more quickly and easily. I just get a square-sided Tupperware and scoop the sludge off the bottom, dump it in a bucket, and I'm done! Fabulous. Fast. Works better than siphoning. Plus, I can fertilize my roses and peonies with the sludge. BONUS.

Really, the pond is just an excuse to plant lots of flowers, drifts of color that ring it all summer long.  

  

Sometimes it's crape myrtle, sage and coreopsis; sometimes it's buddleia, Rudbeckia and zinnias.

One of my other favorite things about having a water garden is the frogs it attracts. There have been several summers when it was overrun with bullfrogs, and they can be a problem, especially if you're a chipping sparrow, warbler or hummingbird. But usually what I get is medium-sized green frogs who quietly take up residence, plop into the water with a little Yikes! when they see a human, then decide we are no threat after all and sit quietly and let us admire their beautiful gold-flecked eyes; their sweet froggy anatomy; their green lips.  

I had one live here for 18 years. I called him Raoul. Maybe he was a she. I'm not sure. But there's a post from 2013 about him here. 

This 2019 model was one such frog. Tame as all get out. I could lift the filter out, right next to it, and it wouldn't bat an eye.

  
Maybe it's because I fed it a couple of times.


            

I love this video. Frogs don't really seem to be looking at anything, until zoop! they nab it. And they don't seem to notice anything, except that they notice everything. Don't be fooled by their impassive golden eyes. They're watching your every move. And if you toss a worm to them, they know it was you who did it, and they hope you'll do it again. Same goes for lizards. Lizards NOTICE.

I posted this video on Facebook, and one of my friends who does wildlife rehab left a comment warning me that Superworms (the giant mealworm offered in the video) are dangerous to frogs! Well, who knew that? She said they can chew their way out of the frog's stomach! OMG! Huh? That sounded weird to me, so I asked The Google about that. Like many things I learn on the Intertubes, whether that's true or not depends to whom you're talking. I found some herp keepers' forums that emphatically pooh-poohed such claims. The story apparently originated with Petsmart, whose employees claim this to be true, and who warn people not to feed Superworms to amphibians or reptiles. Oh.

Superworms, for those who don't know, are normal mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) that have been given hormones that keep them from going through their normal instars. Basically they are arrested in development, staying in the larval stage, and they just get bigger and bigger instead of pupating and turning into beetles.  These Superworms I have now date from summer 2018. I'm curious to see how long they will live! They're handy to have on hand if you have a bird that needs a big meal.

Me, I trust a frog to know what it can handle and what it can't. This frog didn't have the slightest hesitation glupping up my superworms. (It only ate two). Having had a frog (Big Fergus) who ate BIRDS, with their pointy beaks and sharp claws, I had my doubts as to whether a large mealworm could kill its captor by chewing through its stomach before the mealworm died. Mealworms, super or not, give up pretty easily when you get them wet, not to mention, I'd think, when they drown in stomach acid. 

But. 

I didn't see our sweet green frog again after it ate those mealworms. As the days went by, I began to wonder...had I killed our frog with kindness?

Evil cackle. Another cliffhanger. You know how I love 'em. I'll be back. 

Heads up. Next installment is graphic. Not gross, in my opinion; more cool, but graphic. 

Hang on for that ride.

Peeking Into Nests

Having left Duck Creek, we're going down Stanleyville Road.  It's still May 6, a whopper of a day checking all my bluebird boxes. Warren #1 has five brand-new hatchlings. It's hot, and they're panting as the sun pours in the front of their little slot box. They'll be fine. A bluebird baby has a resting body temperature of 104.

Warren #2 has five two-day-old baby bluebirds (below), also dumping heat through their mouths. It's such fun to find all my bluebird boxes "full of meat," as my Dad used to say. When I got into bluebirds upon moving to Connecticut right after college, I came home and put boxes up for him on the old farm where he kept his huuuge collection of antique cast iron hit-and-miss gasoline engines in a chicken house out west of town that he rented for a pittance. He loved having that place to go to, where Mom couldn't holler at him for bringing grease upstairs from the basement. So I put up four bluebird boxes there, and he called me a few weeks later and said, "When I checked my boxes every one of 'em was full of meat!" Ha ha ha ha ha. He had a way with words. I laugh just remembering that.

I'm sure without even checking that the farm and DOD's ramshackle chicken house have long been sold and rolled under by housing developments. I'm not going back to Richmond to look. If ever there were a place you can't go back to again, the horse and orchard country west of Richmond, Virginia, would be it. I'm glad it was largely intact when I was growing up, but seeing it fall to development changed me. Watching them smash the fragant pineywoods for Circuit City stores and bulldoze the horse pastures and orchards for giant megachurches when I was a teenager made me who I am today: a rural hermit with a ferocious love for the land and country living. Protective of the things I hold dear. Old barns, woodland, meadows, bluebirds, to name just a few.

Hm. I was checking bluebird boxes. Right. Back to it. Warren #3 still has eggs, which by my calculations should hatch May 7. I hold them to the sun--my way of candling them--and see dark embryo and large gas space in all five...looks good. They should all hatch. I'd like to show you that, but I can't hold the camera and an egg at the same time without fumbling and maybe breaking an egg. Bluebirds come first.

Warren # 4 got started early. These chicks are six days old already! Hmm. She laid five eggs--let's see what's under these rather high-sitting babes. I tease down into the pile and unearth two unhatched eggs.

 Two of the eggs haven't hatched, and they won't now. They're infertile. I remove them, carry them off to the asphalt road and break them to see if the embryo ever started. Nope. Just yellow slush in there. I see that a lot, but it's usually only one egg that fails to hatch. I always break them to check, because I'm curious, and there's no chance they'll hatch after the other chicks are a couple of days old, because they won't get the direct heat from the female's brood patch, and besides if they were viable they would already have hatched. So I get them out of there lest they break when the babies get old and start jumping around, and make a sticky mess in the nest.

Note how big and fat these three Day 6 chicks are. That's because Mom and Dad have fewer mouths to feed. 

That finishes Stanleyville's four boxes. Now I've got 13 more to check on our road and farm.

On my way there, I see a frog leaping, those huge, high, desperate leaps frogs do when they are in trouble. It's 11 AM on a hot, dry, sunny day, and this frog has come up from Fergus' pond, climbed a very steep hayfield hill, and is crossing the road into another enormous dry hayfield. There's no water where he's headed. I cannot imagine why he's doing this.

The creased lines running from eye to tail mean he's a green frog--a good guy. Not a bird-eater like bullfrogs. I cannot leave him on this dry ridge in this withering sun. I'm amazed how wet he still is, but it seems to be just his own slime keeping him moist. Has he leapt all the way up the hill?

I can't leave him here. He's headed to nowhere, frogwise. So I impulsively drop him in a Solo cup I keep in the car for just such things, and pour some cool water over him. And I head home. Once there, I dump him out on the rock by my water garden. I lost Raoul, my 20-something green frog, in the horrible winter of 2013, and I miss him badly. I hope this is my next Raoul. I have a giant bullfrog in the pond I need to rehome. I'm pretty sure this sizeable green frog is too big for the bull to eat, but you can never be sure with bullfrogs. Ugh. Bullfrogs. Click the link if you want to know why I say Ugh. Bullfrogs. 

The frog seems stunned and amazed to have been teleported. He's got his back hunchd defensively, and he's frozen. Gently, I nudge him with my finger to face him toward the pond, and in a single leap he knifes into the cool dark water. See you later?

More babies and surprises anon!

An Oklahoma Eden

Not only does Debby Kaspari create beauty on her drawing board and in her sketchbooks, but she creates it all around. Here's her Oklahoma deck, where she and I shared a bottle of Australian wine and talked about everything and nothing.

The water garden, just off the deck, astounded me. There was a biological filter of iris and other water plants, the roots taking the nitrates out of the water, aided by a recirculating pump. Obviously, it was working perfectly, in stark contrast to the cauldron of pea soup that my little water garden is this spring. Ploop, ploop.

Larkspur all around.


And later in the season, coleus and zinnias in perfect bronzy harmony. Debby is a colorist of the first rank.


Deb's garden was a painting in itself, ever-changing, an outward manifestation of the creativity and beauty within her.

On May 4, Debby posted this photo on Facebook, with the tagline:

Why spring in Oklahoma totally rocks!Lazuli and painted bunting at the feeder at one time. And she also had indigo buntings, plus an indigo x lazuli hybrid.


Her artwork celebrates the beauty of plants as much as it does that of birds and animals.
Irises from her own garden:
A jack in the pulpit found deep in the Harvard Forest:
When I visited in April, we took an evening walk around the circle of her rural subdivision. The honey locusts were in full bloom. It wasn't just the wine--we were drunk on the Oklahoma spring!

People are fond of saying that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes I believe that, and sometimes that platitude just doesn't fit. The tsunami that hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia in January, 2005 is one thing that didn't need a reason, and can't be glorified or justified with a reason anybody could come up with no matter how convoluted their thinking.

But I would like to think that my trip to Oklahoma to appreciate all that Debby and Mike have done to make the world more beautiful had a reason. I feel blessed that I experienced that, blessed to have seen the gardens and listened to the waterfall and slept under their roof, blessed to have nosed around her upstairs studio and peeked into the flat files full of her paintings and drawings.

Blessed to have walked out that evening to put our noses to the honey locust blossoms, blessed to have witnessed it all.

The ToadPond

It was supposed to be a fishpond, a water garden, but it's really a toadpond for the first couple of months of spring. No matter--we love toads around here, and we have more every year thanks to the breeding place we've made for them.

I can always tell it's spring when Phoebe goes around wearing toad jewelry--rings and bracelets of horny male American toads, amplexing her for all they're worth. Or would that be horny American male toads, or male horny American toads? I do not know.                                                 

I love redheads. You got a pretty mouth on you. Mmmf!  You look very very pretty tonight. Erp!

Urgg. This guy is such a TOAD.
Phoebe spends many hours playing with the toads, trilling to start them singing, staring into the depths of the pond, tickling the shubunkins and listening to the trickling fountain. I spent hours like that as a kid, too, but I never had a water garden, or living amphibian jewelry. We always want more for our kids than we had ourselves.

I am grateful to have a daughter, red-headed, limber elf, who finds the same things funny and beautiful as do I. It is hard to resist telling her absolutely everything, because she feels like my best friend.