New frogs

Two new frogs came over to my pond this summer... one green, one brown. The green one seems to enjoy the pond more and stayed there the whole summer, while the brown one showed up in the flower bed, quite close to the pond, for a few days and nowhere to be seen again. I have to say, the brown one looks quite interesting. I showed my kids the photos and they insisted that it's a toad. But I said this brown one has the same pattern as the green one, and the overall look of it is more a frog than a toad. And I looked up to some websites and confirmed that this northern leopard frog, Rana Pipiens, has two kinds, the green one and the brown one.

Now I don't know if the frogs my kids were holding during vacation in a ski resort in canada a year ago the same speices as this one, but they certainly look quite similar, though I have to say Francois's frog was the biggest I've ever seen and caught in my life. We ended up letting the big one going back into the pond behind us. The small one? Melissa took it back home and trying to raise it, but this little one was just too smart! It jumped out of the container one night and disappeared...

Lessons learn: if a frog can jump 5 ft. away with one leap, it can jump over obstacle that is one foot high... and don't underestimate anybody's potentials.