Operation Tadpole: Success!
We finally succeeded in finding tadpoles to import to our frog pond! I guess we couldn’t officially call it a “frog” pond until now. It has been primarily a goldfish pond for us, and still is, but now we have little tadpoles swimming around in there too! I constructed a little shelter to keep them safe from the gaping mouths of our large goldfish for while they are so small. I hope they grow large enough soon to be let out of it, because it seems quite rickety to me. All it will take is a bird landing on top to make it collapse, and I sure hope wind won’t wreak havoc with it, either. Our goldfish were so curious as to what I was doing…they kept swimming right up to my hands, and going right up to the black screen and investigating.
We put some tadpole food pellets in there with them too, so hopefully they will figure out that it is food for them. There are six of them in there and they all have varying sizes. We found these at a local stream that we’d heard had tadpoles. We first started looking even before Easter at the creek below my parents’ house. We didn’t find any then (though we did find a HUGE freshwater mollusk shell…gorgeous!), and we didn’t the week after Easter, either…at the creek near their house OR at the other stream.
We went back today to the stream near here and finally had luck! We did quite a lot of walking, and a lot of slipping on rocks and searching, but we finally found a shallow area that had more than one tadpole! I ended up with a drenched sock and water in my boot (we both need new boots…I guess both of ours have holes in them, because on one of Josh’s slips he ended up with a wet sock, too), but it was worth it. I just hope they survive to turn into frogs, and I hope the frogs decide to stick around here and serenade our yard with their wonderful songs!
