nice day to start again

There's a chance that Drury P. Armstrong might recognize his historic old house on Kingston Pike. If he were alive, of course. He hasn't been there in over 150 years. The Armstrong-Lockett House is now used for wedding receptions, which is why my family and I were there today. The multi-level William P. Toms Memorial Gardens fill the space between the house and the Tennessee River. Across the water, the cows at the UT Ag Campus were visible.

As we explored the terraced garden, my son noticed signs of life in a puddle near a fountain. It hasn't rained here in a while. My guess is that the water accumulates when the sprinklers are running. I remember Sir David Attenborough saying on one of his TV shows that life will always find a way to burst forth in any available space. The puddle was teeming with tadpoles of assorted sizes. We suspected that more than one species of frog has used that water to procreate. I used my cell phone camera to take some picture and to shoot some video of the little swimmers.

there's waldo

The challenge was a tough one. Did you find the little mountain chorus frog in yesterday's photo of the leaves and rainwater on my pool cover? In case you had trouble, my son used Microsoft Paint to draw a circle around the frog for you.

where's waldo?

Today turned out to be the annual tadpole rescue day at our backyard pool. Because the frogs seemed to start "singing" later this year than last year, I had thought that maybe there wouldn't be as many tadpoles to save. Also, I scheduled the pool opening for a week or so earlier this year in an effort to give the frogs less time to get all romantic on my pool cover. It didn't matter. There were still plenty of relatively large tadpoles for us to collect in a bucket today. In previous years my son and I had unsuccessfully tried to see the parent frogs in the accumulated rainwater. Today we spotted two and put them in the same bucket as the tadpoles. See if you can find the frog in this photo:

silence of the frogs

A couple of weeks ago a kind blog reader sent me a link to a story about a frog that may very well have been trapped in amber for the last 25 million years. That story got me thinking about the frogs in my own backyard. I haven't heard a peep out of them yet. By this time last year, the Mountain Chorus Frogs were singing like crazy, which I suppose makes them Crazy Frogs by definition. Why are the frogs not screaming, Clarice? Could it have anything to do with the weather? It was surprisingly cold this morning with a few stray snowflakes in the air. Frogs haven't survived for over 25 million years by letting their tadpoles freeze to death. What if the frogs know that Spring is not yet here to stay? Could they be thinking about the upcoming anniversary of the Blizzard of '93?

how about a nice Hawaiian pest?

Turtles and frogs have always been among my favorite animals. As kids, my cousins and I would look for box turtles and toads at our grandparents' summer cottage. Since starting this blog, I've saved a turtle and many tadpoles from my pool.

Whenever my parents traveled to Puerto Rico on business, they would hear the call of the coqui. One time they even brought back a coqui hand puppet for me. Coquis were recently celebrated at a Florida zoo. Knowing that, it's no wonder that a decorative front license plate caught my eye in a local parking lot. The plate had a picture of a little frog and several Spanish words on it including a word that I recognized: coqui!

I was photographing the truck when the owner approached and demanded to know what I was doing. I told him about my parents and the coqui and asked him to translate the rest of the license plate for me. He said that "Boricua" refers to someone from Puerto Rico and the rest of it means that he is as native as the coqui.