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Bull Frog In Paradise

By Kate Loving Shenk

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 26Aug2008 Word count: 520 Viewed: 315 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Friend Bull Frog has come to live with us in the basement.

This is the height of cricket season, and crickets live in abundance here on Blue Heron Farm.

Bull Froggy loves crickets.

S/he lives under an under water rock.

When we plop the cricket into the water, Bull Froggy, with the speed that the eye can see only briefly, zips and splashes and the cricket is gone.

What a show!

The dogs are first to line up for this natural entertainment and wonder.

Froggy seems to in-joy being the center of such gleeful delight!

This reminds me of the Saw-Whet Owl we rescued after she crashed into our windshield, crossing the Gettysburg Battle Field.

Tom's Aunt Hilda was dying and we were traveling to her to offer our support.

We later found out that the Saw-Whet migratory pattern centers right there and was in place long before the Battle itself.

We took her home and nursed her back to good health, and she lived in the barn that entire winter.

A small owl of all types of woodlands, the Northern Saw-whet Owl can be found roosting in winter in small, dense conifer trees, sometimes even in parks and gardens. Its defense upon discovery is to sit still and not fly, leading people to perceive them as "tame."

The main prey items of the Northern Saw-whet Owl are mice, and especially deer mice of the genus Peromyscus. Adult mice usually are eaten in pieces in two different meals. One owl was found dead after apparently trying to swallow a large mouse whole.

The female Northern Saw-whet Owl does the incubation and brooding. The male brings all her food while she is incubating. She leaves the eggs for only one or two short trips each night, to defecate and cough up a pellet.

While the female Saw-Whet broods her nestlings, she keeps the nest cavity very clean. But, when the young are about 18 days old, she starts spending the night in another hole, and then the dirt starts to accumulate. When the young owls leave the nest after another ten days to two weeks, the nest cavity has a thick layer of feces, pellets, and rotting prey parts.

The food of our Saw-Whet consisted of a mouse or two each day. We'd carefully place the rodent into a coat pocket before walking quietly into her territory.

She was waiting for us.

Like the speed of bewitching magic, she's swoop and take that mouse out of pocket and return to her perch on a high barn beam, bowing each time with wide alert eyes.

A thank you.

A message of gratitude.

The day Tom's Aunt Hilda passed, our Saw-Whet buried herself alive in the corner of the barn.

Saw-Whet was a messenger of the after-life worlds, calling to all of us if we listen.

Bull Froggy reminds me of the owl, of the dogs, of the river where she will ultimately make her way back, to the depths of worlds made more mysterious by the unseen depths of moving water.

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