I do love

having frogs living in my garden. We have several frog ponds and I keep a couple of bowls filled with water in sheltered parts of the yard in the summer as well. We have several species and I don't even mind the motorbike frogs (Litoria moorei) with their chorus of  "Hello, ladies. Care to join me and make beautiful babies?" that's going on every evening.  It sounds like this and, when there are a number of males trying to entice females to lay their eggs in the ponds as there are at the moment, it can get rather noisy. When I went out last night one handsome boy was draped over the edge of one pond while another was spread out on the surface of the water while they alternately called. They must be successful in attracting mates because there have been tadpoles all year regardless of whether it was breeding season or not and much to the delight of a certain Miss Two who spends considerable time squatting at the side of the pond trying to get them to come to her.

So it's established that I like having frogs around. What isn't so much fun is where they spend their time when they're not trying to attract a mate or having a dip in a pool. I've been doing a lot of garden work lately and in the past few days I've had numerous encounters with frogs all over the yard. Bear in mind that these are quite large frogs - they commonly reach 10 cms in length - so unexpectedly coming across one can be startling to say the least. I've found them snuggled up under potted plants, in the water wells of water well pots, among plants in the garden and sunbathing around the ponds. One of the sunbathers was tiny - about the size of the first joint of my thumb  - and its time in the sun had turned it as usually happens with these frogs from dingy brown to a pretty cream, green and gold. Then there were the two who were sleeping in a large pot under a pile of smaller empty ones - I'd left them out overnight - until I started to lift the pots out to plant up some seedling tomatoes. I don't know who got the bigger fright them or me as the frogs flung themselves around trying to scale the side of a 45 cms high pot. I tipped them out but truth be told all they had to do was calm down and they'd have had no difficulty scaling the side since they can easily climb up to 2 metres - trees, shrubs, even brick walls don't daunt them. These weren't the only ones I found in unexpected places. Yesterday I picked up a cardboard carton I'd been using to carry plants around to various parts of the garden the previous day and woke another into a panicking rush for cover.

I think Pisces is getting used to my shrieks as yet another frog and I meet unintentionally. I must have been louder than usual with this morning's encounter, though, since he came running when I accidentally stepped on a frog that had settled in under a piece of old shower curtain I'd been using to protect some plants the day before. Luckily I hadn't put my full weight down so the frog escaped relatively unscathed but I wasn't as lucky as the frog since I jarred my knee trying not to hurt it.

Another Froggy Tale

I've known there were three or four different kinds of frogs living in my back yard for a long time. The most obvious were the motorbike frogs that I posted about a few days ago - and they are the most plentiful, too. It's not uncommon to see four or five sunning themselves on the edge of the lily pond.

Another is the green slender tree frog. These are very pretty creatures as you can see from this link and we find them occasionally in the grapevines or among the bananas - we have a small grove of these in the vegie garden. There used to be more before our back fence neighbours cleared their block completely and built a house that takes up almost the whole space but once we get some planting established along the fence we're hoping they'll return in greater numbers.

Then there is the moaning frog - very aptly named as you can tell from the recording which calls mostly when the first of the winter rain begins - but one has been a mystery. It's very vocal and going out into the garden on a Spring or summer evening is all but deafening what with a noisy and very loud mass cicada chorus (sorry, I couldn't find a recording of our local cicadas but believe me they are loud) interspersed with the mystery frog calling equally loudly.

It turns out that this mystery caller may be a quacking frog. It's sometimes called a quacking froglet - and if, like me, you thought a froglet was that stage immediately after a tadpole loses its tail and is a small immature adult you will be surprised to find out that its actual meaning is a frog species which doesn't go through the tadpole stage at all although apparently this frog is not a genuine froglet because it does in fact produce tiny tadpoles. Confused? So am I. Quacking frog habitat covers much of the South West but is limited on the Swan Coastal plain to some scattered wetlands and I suspect, that attracted by our ponds, it - as far as I can tell there's only one male calling - has come here from the wetlands that we have within a few minutes walk. Here's information about the quacking frog including a recording which certainly sounds like what we hear but since I've never seen it, I can't be absolutely sure.