There's a new frog in town

We have two new frogs courtesy of J's Mum's weariness with cricket procurement and enclosure-cleaning. I have to admit that relative to a dog or even a guinea-pig, frogs do not give a great deal back in terms of companionship. J is one of Cheekus' Four First Row Best Friends. He has seven Third Row Best Friends, one of whom is the only girl in any Row, and strangely only two Second Row Best Friends.

I now have two young Spotted March Frogs. They have less appealing faces than my eight remaining Southern Browns but have beautfully patterned - spotted - skins. The little one is rather green and the bigger one is brownish grey. They are slightly less shy than the brownies and like to sit in the water. The marshies have little claws and no webbing on their feet; they can't climb very well but they swim with great verve.

The brownies like to hide in curled-up leaves and look faintly horrified at being made to swim. They like to clamber up the sides of their container using their suction-toed little treefrog feet. I think there is no doubt the brownies are obese. Their bellies bulge out all over, they ignore crickets sauntering brazenly past them and a representative sample (one) failed the hop test. This is when you let a frog climb to the top of the box, hop off, and then gently encourage it to keep hopping in the grass by moving a hand close up behind it. (No contact required.) My sample brownie managed three short, floppy, rather pathetic hops before deciding that being eaten by a hand probably wasn't so bad after all and staying put. If anyone knows of some helpful frog-conditioing exercises let me know.

Double naughtiness

Buying Papa Meilland and Souvenir de la Malmaison comprised the first naughtiness of the afternoon, because I have already put in Margaret Merril and I had told myself one baby rose was plenty to nurse through summer. But I also resisted buying Rosa Mutabilis, Aoteoroa, Scentimental and Penelope, so I think it evens out.

The Eastern Common Froglets (I think) have started spawning at my favourite nursery so I will have to decide how many frogs is enough for one family and whether I should acquire any more spawn-encrusted pond plants.

The second naughtiness was finding out my Mum's garden has Green Goddesses tucked in a corner just behind Dad's astronomy dome and deciding to get some from her, even though I had earlier been told by that same favorite nursery that they don't stock these because arum lilies can't keep themselves nice in Australia. So I didn't tell them about the plain white arums I'd bought by mail-order, wished callas came in green, and wandered off to have another coochie-coo at the tads.

That's quite enough now frogs

We're down to about 8 frogs now. I put their box in the winter sun and didn't notice for an hour or so that the lid was loose. Only one seems to have got out; the rest know when they're onto a good thing ie a steady stream of crickets. It was a male. Only the males call and the box has been very quiet for a day or two, so I figured we had lost the only remaining boy.

At one stage the kids had named our frogs and christened a pair of likely lads Bradley and Dumbledore. They immediately became indistinguishable from every other frog we had, except Matilda. We know she is still with us because of her whale-like proportions and very pale skin.

Last night around sunset Bradley (or Dumbledore) happily sang his usual evening song from somewhere in the garden. I rushed about with a torch but of course he promptly shut up, and anyway was hiding.

Around 3 am the awful truth emerged. Bradley (or Dumbledore) had not been the last boy. He had simply been the loudest. Bradley and Dumbledore manfully croaked at each other for a good half an hour, Bradley (or Dumbledore) from the garden and Dumbledore (or Bradley) from the frogbox in the hallway right outside our bedroom. They have now been renamed Bloody Frog 1 and Bloody Frog 2.

More frogging

The frogs are now about full-grown. Some of them are incredibly fat, like odd-coloured ping-pong balls. We've identified them as Southern Brown Tree Frogs (Littoria Ewingii), very common and not needing a licence to be kept in Victoria. http://frogs.org.au/frogs/frog.php?frog_id=3

About once a week we trawl through the frogbox, sifting leaf-litter and looking under their bits of bark. We catch them and give them a swim. It's not clear whether they enjoy this but at least it livens up their day.

We remove any dead crickets or mouldy stuff, refill the swimming tray with clean water and reassemble the habitat.

If it's sunny we watch them swim and kick and climb and we chase any that get out of the swimming box (usually a lot. At the same time. In as many directions as possible.). Then they go back in their frogbox with fresh crickets to hunt.

However the census has been dropping. It hit a high of 31, then dropped to 20, and this week we had only 15. Evidently they haven't read the Act and are releasing themselves into the wild. These days we keep their box on the front porch.

Sadly this was too late for one.