Another annual event has come and gone at the Wojo household. While we were glad to participate, we’re also glad that it will be another year until it comes this way again. Why? We’re exhausted…
So, you may be wondering, was it my birthday?
Nope. That’s in February.
An anniversary?
Nope. That was in June.
A new member of the family?
Well, sort of. Actually, hundreds of them.
Regular readers of this column may remember when I wrote about the toads that come to reside in our pool each spring to mate. I called them Democrats because the mating call sounds like “Baraaaaaaaaaack…”
There are results to their actions, as we first discovered five years ago. We were about to remove the pool cover and open the pool for the season.
“Wow, you’ve got a ton of tadpoles in there,” our neighbor, Ernie, said.
What? What? Where?
The city girl in me began to panic, but was intrigued at the same time.
I ran over to the pool, put my hands on the edge, and gazed into the murky water that had gathered on the cover.
Darned if I didn’t see them. Lots of them. Hundreds, easily.
“Um, what are we supposed to do?” I asked Ernie, as I tend to be clueless about these “country” matters.
“We can catch them, put them in a bucket, and then dump them into the stream,” he said. “Otherwise, when we take the cover off, they will die on the grass.”
DIE? And on my GRASS? UGH!!!
There was no way that I was going to let this happen. The first year, the home’s previous owner helped us open the pool, as we had no idea what we were doing. Just thinking of all those poor tadpoles flopping around…
Clunk…
Sorry, I fainted there for a second.
Besides being an amphibianatarian, in this instance, I have to admit that I’m also easily grossed out, and the thought of my lawn filled with dying tadpoles…
Clunk…
Whew…okay, I’m better now. Let’s move on.
So that year, we had the first of what would be the “Annual Tadpole Rescue” in my backyard.
For hours and hours, Brad (my husband), Ernie, and I used the pool skimmer and plastic cups to scoop all the tadpoles out of the pool cover.
We dumped them into an extra-large bucket, into which we had put some of the gross pool-cover water. Evidently, the little critters like that smelly, disgusting environment.
The tadpoles seemed to not understand that we were trying to save them. We know this because once we caught a few, the other ones would swim as fast as their little tails could take them to get away from us.
When you think of it from their perspective, I guess a gigantic hand holding a huge plastic cup would look like the Jolly Green Giant would to us if he existed in real life—really big and scary.
I can just imagine some of the conversations:
“Hey, Toby, you’re starting to sprout legs man! Way to go! That makes the chicks crazy!”
“Yeah, I’m looking good…Hey, what’s that shadow in the sky? Oh no!!!”
Splash…Toby ends up in the bucket with his tadpole friends.
This year, there were less tadpoles—but only because there was less water in the pool cover as the inflatable pillows that we put under it actually stayed inflated this year. But we waited longer than usual in the season to perform Operation TP Rescue.
One morning, Brad came in after looking at the pool cover and said, “We really need to get them out of there soon. A lot of them have legs, and I don’t want to come home from work to a backyard filled with hundreds of toads.”
Hundreds. Of. Toads.
Clunk…
That next weekend, I was out there scooping them out.
Our friend, Cellina, and Brad rescued most of them. Once again, they were set free into the stream to grow up and live out their toady little lives in the wild.
Or, as one friend once said, they were eaten by a predator.
But I’m not going to think about that.
Michele Wojciechowski, who truly believes that the tadpoles are safe, writes “Wojo’s World™” from Baltimore.