Visiting the Frogs!

  While being quarantined due to the virus, I have been taking full advantage of my time being alone.  The yard is being completely redone..gardens, arbors, Frog Pond...everything.  It appears that I have been quite slack on the upkeep of things around here so now is the perfect time to get it ship-shape!  Yesterday, I cleaned the Frog Pond and did some trimming of bushes near it.  As I was pulling out a lot of the water hyacinths, tiny froglets were trying to scoot out of my way.  I knew there were a ton of tadpoles but did not realize that they were already at the stage of morphing into frogs!  Hundreds of different froggies were hiding under the hyacinths and waterlilies!

 Since we literally did not have a winter, the frogs stayed active all year.  There were eggs in the pond in February!  The tadpoles stayed a long while before becoming metamorphlings but once they started changing, it happened quickly for all of them.  While clearing the pond of the overgrowth of hyacinths, I had to be extremely careful not to toss out the tadpoles.  Some had their little arms but no back legs while others had all four legs but still had the tadpole tails.  

  This evening with the cloudy overcast, the   froggy serenade is going strong.  Toads, green tree frogs, leopard frogs, chorus frogs, pickerel frogs and an occasional bullfrog can be heard adding their voices to the cacophony.  This means one thing...the freshly cleaned pond will be filled with eggs in a few days.  More tadpoles are on the way!