Of Frogs, Ducks and Spring

It's been in the 60's here the past few days. And on my walk through the local nature center the other day I heard lots of ducks quacking. Only I couldn't see them.

"Odd," I thought, and kept walking.

I came to a larger body of water and the quacking cacophony was unbelievable.

Only, no ducks.

Being blessed with a brilliant mind, I deduced that the "quacking" was coming from the frogs.

It was like happy hour at the pond. "Hey, Baby," they were all saying. "Wanna date?"

I took the boy back there yesterday. It was, after all, the first day of Spring, and it was about 73 degrees out, thus making it an undesireable day to stay indoors, so I said "Hey, let's go for a walk and listen to the frogs." And we did.

I guess most of the froggies found themselves dates, because the noise wasn't as boisterous as it had been just a couple of days earlier. But you could still hear the bizzare quacking coming out of the pond.
We met up with another mom and with two girls and they showed us the motherload of egg sacks. There was a point in the pond where it narrowed and a tree branch was laying across the water and resting on the top. And there, under the branch, were countless numbers of greenish looking egg sacks. You could see all the tadpoles (tadpoles?) inside. Thousands of them. Waiting. They looked like alien egg pods waiting to hatch and overrun the human populations.

When finally the others left, we moved on to a hike in the woods and by the Vernal Pool, looking for the egg sacks of salamanders as well as more frogs. But we didn't find any.

The trip home was uphill and we were hot and sweaty by the time we got home.

Nature's pretty cool when you don't have to touch it.
 
Happy Spring