One of my favorite Uncle Remus stories is “Teenchy Tiny Duck”, a tale of little puddle duck who found a satchel of money. I read it often and drive my children crazy, but my grandkids enjoy the story.
I don’t have a Teenchy Tiny Duck in my backyard, but I do have a Teenchy Tiny Frog – a really Teenchy Tiny Frog. When he is perched on a lily pad, he appears to be about the size of marble, no bigger.
What kind of a frog he is or where he came from, I have no idea. He just showed up last week. My bullfrog tadpoles were five times larger than Teenchy. Teenchy would have had to have parents, or a single parent that used our pond to hatch her eggs, but I never saw a frog small enough to have such a small baby. I glanced through a list of small Virginia frogs, and it could be a Northern Cricket Frog or a Pickerel Frog. I asked Teenchy, but he wouldn’t say.
It bewilders me because we have no nearby source of water, like a pond or a river. There is a very small creek about 500 yards from our house, but it’s dry half the summer.
Sometimes I think that there are such things as Frog Storks that just fly over and drop frogs in one of our ponds. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.