It’s a beautiful, sunny day, warm enough to skip the sweater and just ride with my coat over a tee-shirt for the first time since the autumn. I head north and decide to snap some photos by the lake where I’d heard all the frog mating music a few weeks back. No one is making any noise today. All that insemination presumably happened and now all the countless tadpoles that spawned as a result are working the gills they'll loose, developing quietly beneath the swamp surface.
The seven-year-old me would have wanted to go down to the water’s edge and verify this hypothesis. More than verify I would have wanted to marvel in the tadpole proliferation. I suppose I would have wanted to bring some of the tadpole’s home. I would have wanted to own and lay claim to them, if I’m honest about that particular period of me. I may well have averred from the messy prospect of bringing home a bucket full of tadpoles home. But if, there were any frogs, I certainly would have wanted to catch them and bring them back to look at and marvel at, in a bucket.
I seem to remember when I lived in Harrison New York that there was an abandoned field that connected the end of Bellain Avenue with Brentwood Park. And it must have been spring time, when I was seven or so that I crossed that field and looked down at a random pool of water and saw hundreds of small tadpoles swimming about aimlessly. I was dazzled. And I don’t think I knew what to do.
Not now, perhaps. But soon, this pond will become an extraordinary feeding ground then, if my guess about the tadpole population proves accurate. Birds like the heron and snakes and owls and presumably a broad swath of the mammals and bird predators that exist would be rather interested in all these young frogs in the making. What is the infant mortality rate like for frogs? Dreadful, certainly. There all quiet today. That’s for the best. I’m intrigued, but not sufficiently so to plod on down there and explore further, today.
Saturday, 3/21/20
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