All is now right with the world. We have a frog in our lily pond.
It doesn’t take much to please some people and when I come home from work, get out of my Jeep and see a tiny frog perched atop a lily pad, I’m a happy camper. I don’t know what it is about frogs, but I enjoy having them around.
We have an above-the-ground pond – I think it was once an old whiskey vat that holds maybe 60 or 70 gallons of water. Several years ago, Nancy planted some water lilies in the make-shift pond and they bloom beautifully throughout the summer. Also, a number of years ago, a frog showed up in our pond. He stayed for a while, until a snake ate him. Since then, I have been stocking the pond with small frogs and/or introducing tadpoles, hoping they will become genuine frogs.
The stocking of real frogs hasn’t worked out so well. They tend to leap out at first scare and don’t know how to climb back in. However, we had a little leopard frog a couple summers back that would take frequent leaves from his pond confines and wander out in the grass hunting for bugs and stuff and then simply hop back up and in.
Our current resident is a tiny frog, about the size of the tip of my thumb. I’m pretty sure he was from one of the tadpoles that Greg Leffler, Kevin Mann and I captured a few months ago from a small pond at the Swannanoa golf course.
I usually name each of my frogs “Uh-Huh”, after the song “Froggy Went’ A Courting and he did ride, Uh-huh.” But I ‘m just going to call this one Froggy.
My frog advisor, Elaine Callaghan, says that frogs will leave the ponds in late fall when it begins to get cold, crawl beneath a nearby rock, burrow in the dirt and emerge in the spring to re-enter the pond. I’m hoping Froggy reads the instruction manual and does exactly that. But until then, it’s nice to have a frog in our lily pond.