Go Retire Psychiatrist

Sena told me she heard and saw that little frog again in our window well. She actually saw it and heard it slap against the window. Two days ago, I looked during the day and didn’t see any living critter in the window well.

This is a little green frog no more than 2 inches long and common Iowa frogs include the green treefrog and the gray treefrog.

So today, I went out there with a camera and a long plant stake. I poked around all over the rock bed and nothing jumped out. It’s 4 feet deep, and I thought that might be too high for a little frog. I found a reference saying that most frogs can jump only 1-2 feet. I focused the camera on the rock bed and couldn’t see a frog, just a few dead leaves.

So, is that frog jumping in and out of the window well? It just so happens that I watched David Attenborough on TV last night and he says a flea can jump 7-8 inches, comparable to a human jumping 40 feet. He didn’t address the topic of jumping frogs. I was a little surprised to learn a frog is a poor jumper, by comparison. Fleas are excellent high jumpers because they have an internal elastic protein made of resilin which can store and rapidly release energy like a darn catapult. And it’s always renewable.

So, has this little frog made a rapid evolutionary “leap” (see what I did there?) and can leap tall window wells in a single bound? This has Mark Twain “written” all over it (rim shot). I can’t recall if I ever read “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

But from what Sena says, that frog was out of the window well 2 nights ago—but was back in it the next night. She didn’t tell me about it when it happened. She could hear it slide down the window pane and she says the frog eyeballed her. And now it looks like it’s out again. I’m pretty sure it couldn’t jump 4 feet.

And then, wouldn’t you know, when I came back inside, she had the camera and was focusing on another thing out in the garden she thought might have been a Baltimore oriole. Remember the post about the tree scar that was supposed to be a robin and she got a 2-minute video? This time it was a dead leaf.

Let’s see what happens with the frog tonight.