Leaping into love, thanks to a magical frog
This is not my story. It belongs to a friend but I wish it was mine. It’s a story about finding love via a very magical frog.
This is not my story. It belongs to a friend but I wish it was mine. It’s a story about finding love via a very magical frog.
I’ll call her Jane, because, well, that’s her name. She had become used to finding frogs in her raincoat. Turns out, raincoats are fabulous places for frogs to hide and she found green tree frog after green tree frog whiling away its time in her humid, plastic coat. However, one day, as she slipped her arm in, a different species of frog slipped right back out again. This frog wasn’t the usual vibrant green but was instead a mottled browny, grey kind of colour. It’s eye was silver with a cross-shaped pupil, and its skin, when looked at in the exact right light, shimmered with a multitude of shiny emerald spots.
She didn’t really know what type of frog it was, only that it was utterly beautiful in a strange kind of way. So she did what many of us do when trying to get to the bottom of a mystery; she turned to the internet. A very small part of the internet actually. She turned to her sister’s Facebook friends list, which just happened to contain a herpetologist (someone who specialises in reptiles and amphibians). She sent a message to this frog expert who identified the magical frog as a Peron’s Tree Frog and they fell in love instantly. See, magic frog. I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened.
Needless to say, my encounters with this frog have been far less life changing. They’re common in urban gardens and we sometimes spot them when we’re out searching for possums, when we occasionally catch a glimpse of the yellow markings usually hidden in the thigh region of the frog as they hop away. Or when I’m outside greeting the pizza delivery dude, when they occasionally plop down from the roof gutter and onto the camellias. The frog, that is, not the pizza dude. That’d be weird.
More often than not though, we know they’re around when they call. They’re a tad quiet now being winter and all. But as the weather warms up, if the weather warms up, come spring you’ll start to hear them again and by the summer breeding season they’re usually quite vocal, cackling away with a rapid fire call, often referred to as a ‘maniacal laugh’ or a ‘machine gun’. Not what you might expect from a magical, love-creating frog.
To learn more about these common frogs, click here.
