Tree frogs and Terrapins, continued and The Tree

If you've read any of my posts, you may realize that we have critters around here. I previously posted specifically about the frogs and the turtles that we see and their eggs that hatch in our yard. Well, we have now seen the remnants of about 20 hatchlings. Unfortunately (well for us and our curiosity) we have not seen the actual baby turtles. Just their opens egg remains. If I'm remembering correctly though, they tend to hatch at night. We are night owls around here, but we have not been turtle hatch searching in the middle of the night yet. I guess part of the problem is we don't know where the eggs are in the ground to keep an eye on them. Egg remnants just appear and a whole in the ground at random times. I guess I need to have terrapin study and letcha know :-).  Hunny and I have both seen turtles in the yard, and thought they may be laying eggs or prepping to lay eggs, but seeing us may have deterred their endeavor.

Now for the frogs.... They are still here, not in the large quantity they once were, but we still have hitchhikers every once in a while. At the end of June/beginning of July we had a few storms that took out a few trees. One of which God gracefully laid down as close to our house and on our back deck without a single scratch, chip, bending of pipes (we just had an irrigation installed and the pipes from the crawl space come out where the tree was laying), gutters were in tact....graceful....you wouldn't know a tree fell on our house. We figured God wanted us to have an even better view of his creation, so he took that tree down for us. And it did open up the view, which we appreciated. Apparently, the frogs loved this tree though. Hunny was cutting the tree into smaller more manageable pieces to be able to pull it away from the house and off the deck. As he did, the frogs rallied. There were the usual abundance of frogs across the back of the house - probably 10. The sun was starting to go down and we were trying to finish up, then we saw something fly from the top corner of the house off of the gutter. Then a minute or so later, again, something flew off the house. The first time I thought I might have seen wrong and that it was a piece of wood flying from the tree as he was cutting. But after the second, I started watching closer. The frogs were jumping from the house to the tree. I watched one make his way down the corner of the house to the rail of deck. I stepped away from the railing. He hopped down the top rail to the corner where he perched in a Titanic "king of the world" moment at the very corner of the deck rail, the leaped. Some jumped from the bottom of the deck, others of windows, then the brave leaders that started the tree jumping movement that jumped from the second floor of the house. It was really quite fascinating to watch. Over the next few days, we had someone come in to haul away the few trees that had fallen - about six in all. I don't know if the frogs clung to their tree or not. After all, they are tree frogs. I can say that there have not been as many on our house. We had one on the gas tank on the grill, and a few hitch hikers on the car, but that's about it. We still hear them occasionally. They are part of the beautiful soundtrack for our house.

We've realized that the animals are very seasonal here also, well most of them. The deer, bald eagles and Frasier the crane (or possibly a blue heron that lives here) are constants. But most are cyclicals. So I will keep you updated on our critters. Hatching terrapins and jumping tree frogs.

Enjoy afunnysomething today!!