Weird Human Behavior #4: Catching Frogs

Last summer I found myself standing stock-still with my kids in an algae-covered pond, which  looked and smelled more like a cess pool.We were hunting. My boy was in frog camp; they had been here earlier in the week and he had caught six. I found this impossible to believe; we’d been standing here for what felt like thirty minutes (probably three) with no luck when suddenly my boy holds up his grubby hand and points. I leaned over closer to him and by god, there it was: a set of tiny nostrils. Nostrils! Before I could blink my boy cast his net and wham! There it was squiggling around in the bottom. A leopard frog.

I didn’t think this activity could be done here, where the winter lasts so long and summer passes in an afternoon. Yet here they were, all over this tiny pond in a neighborhood on the western edge of town. I could hear the buzz of somebody’s television as well as the prehistoric squawk of sandhill cranes.

Later in the summer at a big lake north of here we found another frog. I spotted it and I can neither explain nor apologize for the frenzy of excitement that shot through me when I saw the nasty thing just six inches from my feet, sunning himself. I did what any self-respecting hunter would do; I crouched, held still and shot my hand out to catch him. This produced a flurry of excitement all along the shore. Soon we had The Kid among us, you know That Kid, the one that hangs around parks and campgrounds, even your neighborhood, appears out of nowhere, won’t go home, no parents in sight. Gets way too close when he speaks to you (and he is just as often a she), and really doesn’t listen well, if at all. The Kid, like most of these creatures, was full of lies. He insisted on catching that same poor frog, my frog, about a half dozen times, squeezing it so that its slimy belly bulged over his fingers. “That one’s a goner,” my husband muttered to me, which made me tell The Kid with a smile more like a grimace, “Let’s give him a rest now.” To which The Kid responded, “I catch frogs all the time. I’ve caught a hundred this summer. I’ve also caught four dozen fish in this lake.” Not far off his brother stood casting a line. He gave a silent, disgusted head shake.

Last week at a lake in the mountains, I elbowed my boy out of the way to net a frog as big as my hand, with spots and warts on his back. When we got home, I called two biologists and described it; they knew it was the Colombia Spotted frog because it had pink on his belly and legs. We thought it was diseased. I learned a few other things too.

We must pause together, reader, to consider these stupendous facts:

1. Frogs breathe through their skin. My children insisted this was true. I did not believe them, even if they do watch tons of PBS and go to frog camp. I looked it up. They use tiny blood vessels, capillaries, under the outer skin layers for the exchange of oxygen. When they are fully developed, they also have lungs.

2. Frogs start out as fish. With gills. Tadpoles, in case you forgot. Stop now and really consider this. They are born fish and die something else.

3. Frogs hibernate. I didn’t really think that all frogs died in the winter and the whole population started over again in the spring. I simply never thought about it. They stay alive under the ice in the water, slowing their organs down to survive. In fact, some frogs, like the North American wood frog, actually freeze themselves solid at the first touch of frost. Their bodies shut down. Even the heart. No heartbeat at all.  Toads at high elevations cannot produce this antifreeze effect, which is apparently generated by glucose in the blood, so they must find a deep hole or crevice and drop or dig, yes, dig, all the way below frost level. Then when the season warms these frozen frogs go through what’s called spontaneous resumption of function. They come back to life.

It’s not really weird that we catch frogs. Considering the fact that we can, with our hands or maybe a trusty net, hold these ugly miraculous things and look at them up close, why wouldn’t we?

What is weird, really weird, is that we share the world with them. That they exist. I am not making this up.