Frogs and toads and eggs in the garden -- oh my!

We’re very fortunate to enjoy an abundance of wildlife in our garden. With an acre and a half – and about one third of it is natural woods — we see birds, deer, squirrels, foxes, road runners, coyotes and an abundance of lizards and frogs and toads.

I’ve enjoyed watching frogs and toads near one of our fountains and the pool over the course of this summer. I went out every day to see if someone was cooling off in the fountain. Last week, I let the dogs out at night and counted 16 Rio Grande leopard frogs in the pool at once! They jump in at night and are usually gone by morning. And I found a cluster of frog spawn in the pool. I scooped it out and carefully and slowly replaced the pool water with rain water from the tank over a period of about a day. Now I am refreshing the rain water daily.

They seem to be changing, the eggs becoming elongated as they begin the process of morphing into tadpoles. Several of my garden blogging friends with ponds want to adopt some of them, too! Fingers crossed that at least some of them make it.

Then last night I saw my first Green tree frog on the back wall of the house. This Hyla cinerea was just hanging out and didn’t move a muscle as Jeff took several pictures of him.