Nature's Place

Djinn brought a frog into the house tonight. I won’t have him playing with the little creatures, it’s not right. I know it’s his instinct to kill and he can’t help but be a cat. He’ll play with anything that has the misfortune to instinctively need to move away from him.

But he doesn’t need to hunt for food so I tell him off and he gets the message, for the moment, and then he’s back to being a cat.

I can see the pull instinct has on him, if it moves chase it, scratch it, bite it and toss it until it doesn’t move any more.

Tonight’s frog was lucky, I rescued it. There it is doing an impression of a giant. (The camera settings were all wrong for this one so I turned it B+W.) But the other one was taken outside after all the hoo hah.

I didn’t remember to wash it down in the rainwater to get rid of those hairs you can see, they are from the floor inside the house and can be a serious hindrance to a frogs easy movement.

The little thing, when he recovered enough from Djinn, took a pose as if to defy me. It expanded itself and turned its broadest aspect towards me and when I wasn’t deterred by this it made noises at me and blew this big bubble out its mouth, or from under it.

It has a small squeaky call. An almost comical creature if it wasn’t actually instinctively fighting for its life. More of a brave warrior really.

This is a ground frog; they have been showing up since the rain started a while ago. They aren’t really built for climbing so I put them down by the old rainwater tank where there is cover from the animals and at the moment plenty of mozzies to eat.

The difference between these ground frogs and the green tree frogs that live by the tanks is these ones try to get away when threatened, and so attract the predators.

They can jump long and fast without pause so they can outdistance any smaller, slower predators. One nearly got away from me the other night it was so fast.

The green tree frogs just sit there still as a statue and the cats lose interest, but they also have a presence that deters the cat, the predator.

A strength of character perhaps. Fearlessness, or indifference, takes the sting out of the killers instinct.

All copyright reserved / Mark Berkery