At the risk of sounding cliché, the animal kingdom is, well, wildly unpredictable. This week I am diving into the close encounters of the amphibian kind. In town and far afield, unusual critters are making unexpected appearances eliciting peculiar tales of summer storytelling.
But before we get coldblooded in the animal tales, a pair of baby racoons has been lurking around the chicken coop of Burgar Street residents Kelly Grayum, Brynne Edwards, Barry and Dana Stromberg, leading to a string of animal ordeals. Cute as they are, young Mabel Grayum found the toddler coons adorably endearing. But the little tykes weren’t welcome in the backyard harassing the chickens and threatening to eat their precious eggs. So, after a few sightings they were successfully live-captured and relocated to a new home in the forest far from the coop.
Further down on Burgar Street a pacific tree frog found a new home inside the Gutzlers-Sicilia home. During an otherwise quiet morning last week, Morgan Sicilia heard the chirping of a frog. Sounding very nearby, she started searching for the chirper. Like a game of hide and seek, she followed the chirp until low and behold the small amphib was residing in the cool, shaded soil of her largest houseplant. How the frog found its way into the house and the plant remains a mystery.
A similar frog mystery, a bit more startling, occurred at our home last summer. In his morning ritual to start the day with a hot pot of morning brew, my husband reached the coffee pot into the sink to fill it and glanced down to see a bloated frog carcass in the sink, floating in a small bowl of water. It had been a late night, maybe after a swim meet or some outing, and we left a couple dishes to be dealt with until morning, but otherwise the kitchen sink was cleared out. An unappetizing way to swallow your first cup in the morning to say the least.
We pondered how the frog got in the bowl, or the sink for that matter. The only reasonable explanation of is that it had hitched a ride on some garden herbs or flowers that had been cut and cleaned earlier in the day, hit out until dark, and then leaped to its death unable to find a way out of the bowl. But the matter is still unresolved and quite unsavory.
My final story comes as a gentle warning to my canine compatriots. Beware of the Boreal toad. The Boreal or western toad is a large toad that lives in the riparian forest near waters of a lake, wetland, or river near you. If your dog likes to sniff around and find things to put in his mouth, like ours, pay attention and keep your pooch away from this otherwise gentle creature. The toads become active at dusk when they are most visible to dogs.
The toad excretes a toxic substance to deter predators, causing irritation to the mouth and throat. I can attest from first-hand experience, that dogs who interact with this toad will begin intensely frothing at the mouth and salivating. The salivation reaction is so powerful that any children of the 80s will be transported back to nightmares of the Stephen King horror flick “Cujo” — minus the deadly dog party. The frothing subsides after a few minutes, so need to be too fretful, but for a quick panicked moment, we thought we were in for another potential dog poisoning. Enjoy the clear skies while they last and breathe deep!
