Frog Hunt

With the beautiful weather, we've been hitting the Arboretum almost every week.

Last week, we actually had a picnic in the lilac maze (best place in the world for hide and seek), but the week before, we went frog hunting at the dogwood garden.


We started out finding this bug, interesting because it's an actual bug in the entomological sense.

I generally call all insects bugs, but I was chided for this by an entomologist at the Natural History museum.  A ladybug is not a bug, it's a beetle.  A stink bug, OTH, is a real bug.

 We found no frogs, but three or four toads in the pool at the bottom of the garden.  I'd love to know what kind they are: they are concrete colored and have strange yellow spots on the backs of their thighs.

The kids caught some, but we found no tadpoles.

Then a helpful arboretum employee passed by and explained that the pond had recently been drained and cleaned and all tadpoles moved to the cypress pond.

Aha!  To the cypress pond!

They had a lot of frogs!  We also saw lots and lots of egg masses, but no tadpoles.  I think they were hanging out under the duckweed.

We'll just have to go back in another week!

UPDATE: The "toads" were actually Gray's Treefrogs!