We Haz Frogs

As you may or may not remember I have a cat. Now Mr Puss is 'special' and not only because he has a potentially life threatening health condition which means he get rather spoiled. Having had a very scary beginning to his life, he is inordinately afraid of everything and everyone except Pisces and me. Because of this he's always been an inside cat. We have a large house and he's never shown any interest in braving the outside world being more than happy to just follow me around. He occasionally pokes his head out but that's it. We've had other inside cats and they've all been happy to walk on a lead but not this boy. He wouldn't even accept a harness when he was a kitten.

To help make up for his lack of outdoor activity I keep cat grass in the house, something he goes into a frenzy of delight over. I grow it in two long water well pots that I rotate in and out of the house. Water well pots as you may know have a place for water in the base which wicks up to keep the plant wet and are filled through a hole in the side. I don't usually use this on the cat grass pots because I don't want to bring undesirables like slugs and slaters into the house, so I keep the hole taped over - but when I went out to bring the new pot in the other day the tape had come off.

This hole in this particular pot is quite small - about 3.5 cms across - and I don't know why but after I picked it up I decided I should tip out the car grass to make sure all was well. Since these pots are rather weighty when I went to put it back down it landed rather heavily. Out of the hole popped a large brown motorbike frog (Litoria moorei is its proper name and it gets its common name from the call of the male which really does sound like a motorbike changing gear). It was so large in fact that I have no idea how it got inside in the first place. It sat a few moments staring at me before it was followed by a tiny - and very pretty - green and cream juvenile about 2.5 cms in length. The big fellow took off and disappeared but we had to relocate the little one to the frog pond since it froze there on the hot concrete and I had visions of it dying where it was.

Since then I've found another similar little froggy among my seedlings and these are unlikely to be the last because I noticed yesterday there were at least half a dozen large tadpoles already with legs as well as scores of tinier legless ones of every size you could think of in the frog pond. Most of these will not survive for long but while it may be sad, it's probably a good thing given that just about every potential frog dwelling place in our yard is already occupied - something Pisces doesn't always remember so that startled yells as he lifts something are getting pretty much standard around here.