Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Gray Tree Frog - "Up, Up and Away!"

This jelly bean size Gray Tree Frog-let contemplates it's next jump while experiencing, for the first time, the rays of the morning sun.  24 hours earlier it had climbed out of the duckweed soup it was living in and became a full fledged lung breathing amphibian.


This is the fifth tree frog I have released and all truly know "what's up and what's down" making the release a true challenge.  Simply tilting the container up as if to pour the little critter onto a suitable leaf does not work. The frog just pivots, turns it's nose toward the sky and walks up the side of the container until it reaches the bottom. Turning the container open-side-up gets the frog to the lip of the container but as soon as I would tilt the container so the frog could step out onto the leaf again it was:
pivot, nose to sky, walk up the side to the bottom of the container.  I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me 5 frogs to figure out that the answer was to push the container, open end up, into the branches of the bush and let the tree frog figure out the rest. This all makes a great deal of sense when you consider that it IS a TREE FROG, spending its life above ground only coming down to earth to breed and lay eggs or overwinter in the leaf litter of the forest floor, then climbing back up into a tree or bush per their genetic programming. 

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