Friday, May 11, 2007

Crazy for Critters

Lately, when my little girl Deborah goes outside to play, she has one thing on her mind: catching frogs. The toads and frogs are abundant this year, and they seemed to have moved into the large stump in the front yard, as well as into the landscaping rocks beside our house. I'm afraid they don't stand much of a chance with Deborah around, for she has a really sharp eye. Here she is with a lovely tree frog she caught last night.

DJ & Frog
Here is the same frog, on top of the baby's head :-).

Jonathan Frog

Over the weekend, Deborah found a baby bird beside the house. She promptly brought it inside and we wondered what to do with the fuzzy little fellow. We learned from our research that we should leave it near where we found it and clear away all of the hoopla, observing from afar to see if Fuzzy's Mama would return for him. We were concerned that she wouldn't want him for the essence of Deborah, which surely clung to his fuzz. The ornithology site we visited assured us that birds have a poor sense of smell, so she would likely still want him. Here is a picture of Fuzzy. Isn't he cute?

Fuzzy

Well, after observing from my bedroom window and giving him a nudge closer to his Mom, whom we found was searching in the wrong place, we had success! They found each other, and the mother was able to get her little baby to waddle off after her :-).

I don't have any pictures of the critters my son Joshua brought into the house. We found his shoe in Daddy's office, full of pill bugs. But I do have a picture of some pill bugs that the children played with in the dollhouse earlier on in the spring.

Pillbugs

Life with children doesn't get much more interesting, does it?

3 comments:

  1. Ah yes... We catch spiders, insects, and toads and frogs. Our favorite critters to catch are snakes, lizards, and turtles.

    We've gotten to study various snakes, still trying to catch some lizards (they're fast!), and we've kept and release a snapper turtle and a few paint turtles.

    When we lived in a dryer climate we also were able to catch Wind Scorpions which are neither spider nor scorpion, they're Solifugids.

    Our two recent cartches are a harvestman and a large male jumping spider.

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  2. Oh, your children are breathtakingly beautiful! And so *normal*! :) Little tiny frogs make their way into our home, too. Gosh, I just don't know how, Mama, maybe it jumped on me and rode in!

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  3. Hubby brought home a new critter for us to study, that he found at work. It's a centipede that is a half foot long and as fat as a finger. He's really cute; we named him Pete the centepede. :-)

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