FROGGY!!!!!!

Jacy and I have always loved the Froggy books by Jonathan London so every time we find tadpoles, we love to raise them!  This year makes the 4th year in a row that we’ve raised tadpoles.  We’ve raised them from eggs we found in a stream near the park while at a birthday party.  We’ve raised them in our aquarium with our fish.  This year, the tadpoles made their home in our above ground swimming pool.

After 20+ days of rain here in South Georgia, I gave up on adding chlorine to our pool.  The pool turned green with algae and when the finally stopped, we found thousands of tadpoles in our pool.   Not wanting to arrive at the Pearly Gates and have to answer for the killing of thousands of God’s creatures with a single dose of chlorine, I decided to allow them to live in the pool.

   After about 3 days, the tadpoles had completely cleaned the floating algae out of the pool which made it SO much easier to scoop them out to re-home them.

Although it doesn’t look like it, the tadpoles have eaten a lot of the algae (except what’s on the bottom of the pool)

This is what we scooped out for one trip to the pond

Uncle Jeff just happens to live next door to us and has a pond with a wonderful tadpole habitat already established.  Jacy and I loaded up our tadpoles and drove them down to the pond to re-home them.

A white water bird flew off while we were driving up

Uncle Jeff’s Pond

In order for the irrigation system (metal contraption in the background of one of the pics of the pond), water must be pumped out of the ground.  To keep the water level in the pond stable, an irrigation pipe has been installed.  We poured the tadpoles out at this pipe because the habitat was perfect- lots of algae and grass for the tadpoles to hide in.

New home for the tadpoles!

Jacy pouring the tadpoles into their new home

The tadpoles seemed to love their new home but, before we left, the 3 inch long bass (crappie for you Northern folks!) came out to “investigate”.   We didn’t hang around to see how the fish and the tadpoles “got along”!

Swimming in their new home…

Here’s a couple of interesting facts about tadpoles:

• Some frogs actually lay eggs that, when hatched, contain fully developed frogs- NOT tadpoles!
• Tadpoles tails don’t “fall off”, instead the tadpole’s body actually absorb the tail.  This can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days.
• Tadpoles have coiled intestines!
• Tadpoles love to eat algae (I guess they make great pool guys!).  If you’re going to keep a tadpole and don’t have algae to feed it, they also love boiled lettuce!

Have you ever raised any type of wild beast (like our tadpoles)?  We’d love to hear about it!

Much love,

Windy