I don’t know what happened to the frog I scared the shit out of, but it appears he has decided to relocate to another part of the property. Yesterday (Thursday) afternoon there was only one frog in the umbrella and I have to assume it was the one who didn’t jump down to the deck—a significant leap, by the way.
In fact, last night there were no frogs left that I could see, so I closed the umbrella and put the bungee cord around it. I couldn’t know if this was a permanent condition, but I was hoping one or both would come back. Cleaning a little frog shit off the tabletop seemed like a small price to pay for having them as companions.
This afternoon I took the bungee cord off and lifted up a panel of the umbrella to see what I could see, and there was one frog, looking not unhappy. It was weird, though, because he seemed to be almost all tan and had little if any green on him. I’d seen this before and it might be that they can change color a bit when they want or need to.
I didn’t want to crank the umbrella up and disturb him, but I looked around as best I could and didn’t see another frog anywhere. So maybe the other guy did decide he’d rather live somewhere a guy didn’t shine a flashlight in his eyes and scare him into making a seven foot jump into the darkness. He might have hurt himself making that leap—I can’t be sure one way or the other. I saw no evidence of him on the deck, so if he died, he didn’t die where he landed. I hope he’d okay, but I’d give odds he won’t be back in the umbrella.
I’ve done a lot of damage to my local wildlife this week. None of it was intentional, but you know the old saying about good intentions. Seems it often happens that way when humans interact with wild things. We don’t mean to do them harm, but we end up doing it in spite of ourselves.
08/18/06
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