simple.green.organic.happy.

Green living, playful parenting and the pursuit of happiness

Got Frogs? The Frogs Are Green Photo Contest & Kids’ Art Contest

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Golden Toad

“If we can discover the meaning in the trilling of a frog,

perhaps we may understand why it is for us

not merely noise but a song of poetry and emotion.”

Adrian Forsyth

When we first moved into our new house, we were baffled by a high-pitched, rhythmic noise that occurred around the same times every day. A bit of asking around revealed that these were spring peepers, little chorus frogs common to the area.

And the next year… we heard no peepers. Perhaps we had messed with our seasonal pond at a critical time. Maybe it was related to the recurring Terminix treatments that had been initiated just before closing on the house (carpenter bees had been spotted, I don’t know exactly why pest control had to be called in before we could buy our house, but whatever).

In any case, I felt like something was missing. And I became suddenly, intimately aware of how our actions directly affected our little backyard ecosystem. We wanted to bring back the frogs, so we stopped washing the car in the back and allowing that sudsy water seep into our groundwater. We allowed the seasonal pond to do what it did naturally. We canceled the pesticide treatments that we’d mindlessly allowed ourselves to be enrolled in. We learned about the different animals and insects and native plants that shared our living space and what we could do to support them, or at least not harm them… and this sense of interconnectedness and responsibility has really become a way of life for us.

It all started with the frogs, and it ballooned into a crusade to save the earth. Everything matters. Everything is connected. And I have a bit of a soft side when it comes to our toe-padded friends.

The frogs are disappearing, folks, and not just from my backyard:

…these remarkable and colorful animals are declining at such a rapid rate that they are being called the Earth’s next dinosaurs. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, a third of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction.

In fact, spring peepers, while plenty in many Eastern areas, are declining due to loss of habitat (and careless new homeowners trying to cut back on their mosquito population). They are considered a threatened species in Iowa and Kansas and protected in nearby New Jersey.

Why should we care about frogs?

“There’s no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now,” said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn’t. The fact that they’re cutting out now should be a lesson for us.”

Besides being really cute, and their calls marking the seasons in a difficult-to-describe way (wow, can you tell I write for a living?), frogs play a crucial part in our ecosystem. They serve as predators keeping insect populations under control; some also eat algae, helping to maintain aquatic balance. And they serve as prey for snakes, lizards, birds, fish, and various small animals like foxes or otters.  A healthy frog population means a healthy ecosystem. A declining population… is cause for concern.

What can we do to help?

  • Work to protect and preserve what natural woodland and wetland spaces we have left.
  • Don’t use pesticides or weedkiller.
  • Support FrogWatch USA, a citizen scientist program where you listen for local frog calls and report them to researchers. The data is collected and interpreted to help develop conservation strategies.
  • Spread the word.
  • Instill an appreciation of frogs (and toads, and salamanders, and other small amphibians) in your kids.

To that end,

check out the contests currently running on the website FROGS ARE GREEN!

The Frogs Are Green 2010 Photo Contest is divided into two categories: Frogs in the Wild and Backyard Frogs. Backyard Frog photos should capture frogs in your habitat: on the picnic table, by the pool, riding your bike, and whatnot. Frogs in the Wild photos should feature frogs, toads, or other amphibians in their natural habitat: frog ponds, marshes, in the woods, etc. Photos need to be submitted by September 15th. The winner receives a Frogs Are Green t-shirt or poster and the photo will appear on the front page of the blog all year.

The 2010 Frogs Are Green Art Contest is just for kids ages 3-12. The theme is IT IS EASY BEING GREEN! Artwork- drawings, paintings, sculpture, collage, or whatever medium your kid likes best- can be about frogs and how we can help them, or it can be about ways to be green at home, at school, or in the community. This one ends November 15th, 2010. The winner will be featured in a post and his or her artwork will be used to create a poster for a new Frogs Are Green campaign (winner will get two copies of this poster).  All kid entrants win a FROGS ARE GREEN (eco-friendly) wristband.

Details and submission guidelines for both contests are here. The kids and I are entering, and of course I really want to win, but if one of my readers were to take the prize that would be even more exciting! Let me know if you submit anything, or if you have a good froggie story to tell.

Backyard Camping is Exciting! or, Why I Should Have Left The Dogness Inside

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Kids camping

To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty,
however easy the way,
for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be.

-John Muir

Yesterday, in addition to being the 11th (!) anniversary of my wedding day, was the day of the annual Great American Backyard Campout. I think this is our third year participating, and the kids camp out in the yard quite frequently now, so I was thinking it may be time to move on to more adventurous campsites.

Now I’m reconsidering– last night was enough adventure to last me a while.

Allow me to begin at the beginning. Or thereabouts.

The tent went up without incident- i.e. Jeff did it for us- and the day was so hot that I was vaguely looking forward to sleeping outside, although as usual I underestimated just how hard the ground is and just how chilly it gets in the middle of the night.

After an evening of parachute men, homemade sno-cones and a last minute romp with my brother’s crazy dog, the kids were delighted to find a toad waiting for them by the door and a night lit by a full moon and a billion fireflies. A perfect landscape.

There was the required telling of ghost stories, playing of “I’m going on a picnic,” jockeying for elbow room and poking of siblings, until Mom sang the standard campout goodnight lullaby of, “Next person who talks is going inside with Daddy.” Sleep and snores soon followed.

I finished up a bit of work once they were all asleep– brief pause of thankfulness for the wonder that is Wi-Fi– and then went to put my computer inside.

The Dogness, who had been driving me completely squirrelly nutters pacing the tent and standing on his hind legs to look out the windows, streaked out of the tent into the darkness.

Now. I had been hearing voices for the last ten minutes or so. We live adjacent to a path that takes you down to park trails. It’s hardly ever used because it’s not really drivable and there’s nowhere convenient to park; it’s mainly traveled by bicyclists in the know. But on the weekends the teenagers from the neighborhood up the street like to congregate there and sneak a stinky cig or two. I did the same as a teenager and I leave them alone. But The Dogness? Fiercely defends our property line, and I was sure he was up there harassing them. I dreaded having to confront them in my pjs and having to hear them apologize and call me ma’am. Ugh.

But no. I guess they skittered away as soon as he started going insane.

What my lantern lit was something more like this, with my dog barking, barking, barking, in circles around it.

raccoon

photo by .m for matthijs via flickr

How many mouths Nature has to fill,
how many neighbors we have,
how little we know about them,
and how seldom we get in each other’s way!
-John Muir

It was really tiny, just a babe really, and I guess its defensive position is on its back, and it looked really cute in that second as I illuminated it. I was angry with the dog for scaring it.

Until it started growling and making hissing noises. And popping up onto its feet with its teeth bared.

scary raccoon baring teeth

photo by guppiecat via flickr

Then, I faced the real question: how does one extract their wildly barking, circling (recently adopted shelter BEAGLE MIX, that’s a hunting breed, folks) dog, with one hand already occupied by the lantern, without being bitten by the (possibly rabid) raccoon in the process?

I grabbed a long stick, and tried flicking the raccoon away, but that didn’t work. Every time I got the thing facing the other direction, Jimmy would grab its tail and fling it around in a circle, so that the screeching, bared teeth would come whipping towards my legs and I’d have to eeek! and jump back.

(Did I mention all this was taking place at 1 in the morning? Bark, bark, bark bark, bark, bark…. my neighbors must hate us.)

Finally my brother, who thanks to the fates that be had decided to stay the night, came to help me and manned the stick so that I had a free hand to yoke up the dog. (Not being a blogger, it didn’t occur to him to grab a camera on his way out.) The raccoon sauntered away into the woods, the dog was sentenced to INSIDE, and I went, breathing heavily and covered in gallons of sweat, to wait for the adrenaline to burn off so I could go to sleep.

The kids and Jeff? Never even woke up. (Jacob was awake from the beginning– can’t even imagine what he thought was happening.)

Jimmy, for those concerned, is all up to date with his rabies shots and looks none the worse for wear, but I’ll call the vet tomorrow to have him looked at.

Robin is a bit the worse for wear; my muscles are all sore and spent from trying to grab a frantically bobbing and weaving hunting dog with one hand, while attempting to avoid a series of rabies shots myself. If anyone thinks this is easy I invite you to try it.

In any case, the dog is now maxing and relaxing, sleeping on my bed while I have a day of cleaning, grocery shopping, and work ahead of me.  NOT FAIR.

So. That was my evening. What’s new and exciting in your life?

Rude Awakenings

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I’ll tell you how the sun rose,—
A ribbon at a time.

-Emily Dickinson

You know how I know?

Because I have my own alarm clock: powered by nature, dependable as the sun, and impossible to shut off.

As some of you may recall, my normal day begins pre-dawn, as I get up at 5:00 to see Jeff off to work. (Actually, I wake up at 4:30 when his alarm FIRST goes off, and try like hell to fall back asleep during those maddening eight-minute intervals, but we’ll discuss that some other day.)

Then I take a nap until it’s time to get the boys up at 6:45. So, it stands to reason I’d miss the actual ribbons of sunrise, right?

WRONG. Mr Downy Woodpecker here, he has discovered the beam on my deck that we added as a clothesline post. And every morning he is hammering away.

Woodpecker drumming is generally charming and outdoorsy, except when it is taking place at 6:00am and just a few yards away from your head. And man, you should see the chips fly. It is really something else.

Funny how for years I was putting out premium feed to attract these guys– they like peanuts and suet feeders, by the way– only to have them show up uninvited before I’ve had my coffee.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, in the mor-ning.

The obvious solution, of course, is to get up at 5:00 and stay up, and then go to bed earlier that night.

That has been my plan for, oh, the last three weeks. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is week. And tired.

How do your mornings go?