microfrogs

Last weekend (and I meant to write about this before) I spent an hour planting wildflowers with the East Don Parkland Partners in a wetland rehabilitation area just south of Cummer Avenue off Finch. It was gorgeous: sunny, warm, and still. Wildflowers are a lot easier to plant than bushes and trees, so it went quickly, and everyone was in a good mood, squelching their way along the pond’s banks to plant the flowers in the water before they lost their footwear. Swimming in the pond were hundreds of tadpoles on the verge of becoming frogs, their bellies round and legs extending but the tail still long.

And I decided what any mother of a small child would: I have to bring Frances here! She would love to see the baby frogs.

We went yesterday (another sunny, warm, still day) and as we walked towards the water, I told her to keep her eyes open for the frogs, and let’s not step on all those crickets leaping away from us.

But wait a second, they weren’t crickets.

They were frogs!

Eensy weensy tiny baby frogs. So many of them that wherever our feet went to land, clouds of them would leap away into the grass. So small I struggled to pick them up, afraid of crushing them between my fingers. We’d scramble after them through the mud, laugh as they’d land with a small plop in the pond and en masse swim vigorously away, squeak when they made a daring leap off our hands to the ground below.

There is little as joyful as baby-frog-hunting with a small child on a gorgeous late-spring day.