It's a Frog Eat Frog World

At the beginning of last summer Oscar made a delightful discovery in our backyard, a couple of frogs living in the crawl space access pit.  Every day he ran straight out to their hovel, gleefully shouting something that meant "frogs."  He was fascinated.

Unfortunately, last summer we also had some other, less pleasing backyard inhabitants--who were daily making themselves at home inside, as well.  Ants.  Since we were having trouble keeping them out of the house, we, meaning G, decided to attack the nest.  Hey, what goes around comes around, right?  He read up on several methods for their, erm, permanent removal, and decided to go with...boiling them to death.  Too barbaric?  It gets worse.

That night we filled all our largest pots with water and fired up the stove.  I had some misgivings when we hauled the cauldrons out to take care of business.  The ant hole was very near--you might even say, on top of--the frog cave.  You can see where this is going.

The next day, Oscar ran straight out to the hovel, gleefully shouting, as usual.  No frogs.  "Frogs allgone."  I played dumb and pretended they must be over in the woods looking for food.  Each day when he ran over to the frog hovel, I hoped against hope that the frogs would reappear.  Or that some new frogs had taken up residence there.  But all other would be residents were probably steered away from that real estate by the boiled carcasses of their kin.  G and I were pretty sick about it, actually.

Some time after that, I spotted a frog hopping around out back when I took the dog out at night.  I called G with the kind of urgency that can only come from a guilt-racked conscience.  G got some Gladware, poked holes in the lid, and made a small frog habitat,  complete with chunk of turf, water, and a moth who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  We were NOT going to have another frogicide due to reckless endangerment on our hands.  We left the hapless amphibian on our porch to surprise Oscar in the morning.

The next day, after attempting to excite his anticipation a bit, we presented the frog.  Oscar liked it, but he wasn't as ecstatic as I had envisioned he would be.  We let that frog go before he croaked (ah ha ha!) but caught a couple of others before the summer was over.  Here's hoping this summer brings lots of frogs and no ants.