My 6-year old niece, Presley, discussing why they keep her cat's {Kidbit's} food inside the house: "If we keep it outside the squirrels eat it."
Me: "We don't have squirrels like that in Arizona."
Presley: "You don't?"
Me: "Nope. But we have lizards."
Presley: {pausing to contemplate...} "And Grandma Marti has frogs!"
Yes she does, sweet girl.
And while I was there last weekend my step-dad caught four of them and called me outside with my camera. My UK friends use the phrase "Mad as a box of frogs" and I never really understood what it meant until I saw these frogs frantically trying to escape from the jar that Rod temporarily held them in.
And then there was this bad boy:
I think he liked me though, as he sang me a beautiful serenade at 2:00 a.m.
:o\
Yeah.
♥
Tell me, where do you live and what critters
are common in your neighborhood?
are common in your neighborhood?
13 comments:
Great frog post! I was almost as surprised as you about the number we actually have! I knew about the big toad but not the others. And let's not forget the snails! Those are Stone's favorites--he and Papa usually find several dozen when he's here. Sorry about the frog serenade in the middle of the night! Love you! xoxo
Hi, I'm Amy from Australia and we have spiders that maim and snakes that kill .... all in the backyard some years! Seriously.
In my neighborhood - a quaint little town in rural Pennsylvania - you won't find frogs. Or lizards. But you will find squirrels (lots of them!) and bunnies, the occasional ground hog or skunk, cicadas, crickets, stink bugs, mosquitoes, flies, spiders, bats, and more than our fair share of yellow jackets. And on very rare occasions a deer or brown bear will get "lost" and wander into the residential area.
Here in suburabn London, we have foxes and they shriek very loudly in the wee small hours, sounding like babies. Very disconcerting.
At least we have nothing in the southern UK that can maim or kill...though DD2 swears that frogs and toads can....and we have plenty of those.Our garden also has squirrels...the night time visitors are badgers,bats and foxes...plus slugs and snails by the bucket load....the occasional [harmless] snake,more than enough [harmless] spiders and an amazing array of insect life.Apparently bees are in decline over here...but nobody has told the dozens that live in our garden....and even try to live in the cavity wall!
Love the froggies! I was on "Frog Rescue" duty last week. There's a big tub outside, by the veggie patch. It has got quite full of rain water... A little frog was splashing in it, trying to climb up the impossible straight sides. Of course, if I left him, he'd starve to death, as there was nothing for him to sit/stand on to catch food and nothing in the water for him to eat. So, I tried to scoop him out - no way, he dived to the bottom. So, I thought... And put a long piece of timber into the tub, leaning from the bottom to the top. I hope he was able to hop up that and get out.
There was a toad living in the green house. He made a nest in the corner of D's tomato growing bag. D. was a bit put out, because he wanted to grow a plant there, so he made a new nest for Toady... who didn't use it! We don't know if he moved on, or just found a corner where we couldn't see him, but we haven't spotted him for a while. :-(
We have only had one squirrel in our garden since we came to live here. And it didn't come back. We don't mind, because they would eat all the birds' food. And there are lots of birds visiting our garden - about 20 or so different species of wild bird have visted our garden in the past few years - some regularly, some only a couple of times.
We also have 2 hedgehogs, who shuffle and snuffle their way round the garden in the evenings, eating up snails and slugs (yay!)... And darling little bats, who fly round and round, eating insects...
So, plenty of wildlife in - or passing through - our garden. I think we are very lucky!
I've never seen a frog round here; but a couple of times late at night I have spotted a badger.
not too much here beyond squirrels, chipmunks, bunnies and bees!
In Raleigh, NC we have squirrels, lots of birds, bees, rabbits, turtles and this year several chipmunks. If I was at our river house on the coast I would be able to say seagulls, pelicans, otters, snakes, eels, porpoises, turtles, birds, rabbits, beaver and right now lots and lots of mosquitos.
Love it :) I wasn't keen on the kind of spiders we got in Pasadena.... We get plenty here, but harmless ones! Plenty of squirrels, too. I'm jealous of my compatriots' tales of hedgehogs, badgers, bats and such like, we don't see those just here. We did have frogs in our garden here once though :)
When we had the ponds in the garden, we had frogs...their 'singing' in the night drove us and all our neighbours mental! Now we only have some bats in one of our trees!
Alison xx
our garden in Shropshire, England doesn't see much of a variety of wildlife because I think our two black cats keep them at a distance! We have LOTS of spiders though - usually pointed out by my son who completely loathes them!!
We are very lucky, living out in the 'sticks' because we have bats, frogs, Monkjack deer, moles, foxes and even nightingales singing in the summer.
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