What would an edition of CvilleBuzz be without an update on Uh-Huh the Frog?
As I mentioned a few weeks back, Uh-Huh (named after Froggy Went A’ Courting) materialized in our small lily pond. Don’t know where he came from or how he scaled the walls on the side of the pond, but he’s there nonetheless. At first, he was about the size of the tip of your thumb. The little fellow is now much larger, he’s grown to at least four times that large in less than a month. I thought at first he might be a leopard frog, we’ve had those before, but I now think he’s a baby bullfrog.
One of the reasons Uh-Huh has grown so quickly is because our little pond is full of food. I wasn’t sure if frogs could eat underwater creatures, but I looked it up, and they can. Frogs can eat tadpoles, small fish or any aquatic animal. Our little pond has both tiny tadpoles (I don’t know how they got there either) plus lots of mosquito larvae. I suspect that’s where Uh-huh gets most of his meals – from mosquitos. Nonetheless, our little frog sits diligently on a lily pad throughout the day, waiting and watching for that special, bug-like opportinity.
Whe Uh-Huh grows larger he can eat rodents, small reptiles, other amphibians, crayfish, birds and even bats. A friend of mine, Elaine Calalhan, has a pond full of frogs, and said she recently found a dead bullfrog in her pond which had tried to eat a whole goldfinch and couldn’t quite get it down.
So frogs are opportunistic. I just hope that the same snake that attacked our pond a few years back and ate our resident frog is not just as opportunistic.