Stupid Frogs and their Stupid Lack of Fear

Before it got too hot today, I made a point to mow the lawn. The benefit of having a very small lot in the BIG STATE of Texas is that mowing takes about half an hour at best. That’s minus the trim work and fancy stuff I don’t care to do to make my yard the best on the block. I’ll let the neighbor sweat over that crap.

If I haven’t mentioned our frogs before, let me introduce you. Reader, meet our stupid frogs and their stupid lack of fear. Frogs, welcome to the internet.

As I placed the boys in the backyard and instructed them to play nicely together (hilarious!), I started to mow. On the second turn around the yard, there were the frogs. Waiting. Waiting for me to mow over them. Waiting to have their guts splattered across the fence. Waiting for me to scream.

I stopped to see if the hum of the mower would scare them off. When they just SAT there, I inched closer. The little one hopped, the fat one sat. I inched closer and closer until they finally got scared enough to jump a few feet ahead of me. I followed them, asserted my authority and bullied them to the edge of the fence until they finally wiggled underneath it into the neighbor’s yard. Victory!

Proudly, I spun around and continued on my mowing way, albeit at a slower pace to watch for – you guessed it – more frogs. The rest of the backyard seemed to be clear of them, so I finished up and moved to the tiny neglected strip of side yard near the air conditioning unit.

By neglected, I mean there was about a foot of grass in an eight-foot strip. For whatever reason I will never understand, I just ambushed the grass to get it mowed quickly, not even thinking twice about our stupid frogs and their stupid lack of fear.

Crunch.

I immediately loosened my grasp on the push bar to let the engine cut so I could examine the cement for frog guts. Sure enough, there were remnants of something that had been minced by the mower blades. Sickened, I restarted the mower and very slowly continued on the tiny strip of grass. Frogs jumped out from everywhere, onto the driveway, against the fence, and away from me. Clearly, I was disrupting a frog sanctuary, and it was only when the tiniest frog I’ve ever seen jumped on the driveway and INTO the garage that I freaked out and stopped mowing. I just couldn’t kill frog babies. The massacre was over.

So the yard is half done, and I managed to get the baby frog out of the garage and back into his half-mowed sanctuary. I tried to get a photo of the poor thing but when he charged at me I freaked out and ran in the house. I prefer to practice safe blogging anyway.

4 Comments

  1. I was filling holes along the fence a couple weeks ago and I moved some overgrown grass and there were two frogs down in the hole I was about to fill with gravel. So i stopped caught the two frogs and relocated them to another area of the yard that I wasn’t going to fill. When I mow I go very carefully around that area so I don’t run over the frogs but there are times where they acted just like your frogs, just sitting there playing chicken or possum until the very last second. now the hornets that have made some kind of next in the yard, i just put my lawn mower over the top of where i thought the hive/nest was hoping they’d fly up into the blades. 🙂

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