This is pretty sad, but the highlight of my day comes each afternoon after work as Nancy and I have cocktails beside our goldfish pond. The cocktails are nice, but they aren’t the highlight. The highlight is watching our frogs and hoping they catch a bug in midair. For us, this is exciting , and yes, it’s sad.
But frogs are truly amazing creatures. I think we have three now in our pond, one is very small, the last tadpole to lose its tail, while the others have really grown. They are all bullfrogs and we are really hoping they will winter in our near the pond and keep growing, and eventually bellow outside our window on summer nights.
Usually, when we watch the fogs, and they just sit motionless, but occasionally, we’ll see one move just a bit as he spies an ant coming in his direction.
Kapow! They nail bugs in the flash of an eye. Frogs, of course, have those big flippers for feet, and I assumed they were just for swimming, but they are like springboards when they attack. Frogs can push off, even in water, with those flippers and snatch a bug a foot or more away. They also use the flippers to leap long distances if they are out of the ;pond and need to get back in in a hurry. We have one frog that shimmies his way up on the patio several feet from the pond in order to catch bugs. When we come, however, he leaps back in the pond, jumping as much as three feet or more, and he’s not a very big frog.
Frog watching. It’s not for everyone, but it beats the hell out of watching the daily summary of new corona virus cases in Central Virginia.