Julie Zickefoose: Nature Artist & Writer

As I write, there is a large pickle jar, with a huge bullfrog in it, sitting by the typewriter. His gold-flecked eye stares expressionlessly; his throat pulses gently. It is marbled with cream and olive, the softest of skins. His sturdy arms are extended, four delicate fingers pigeoned in, holding his head just above the water in the bottom of the jar. Tympanic membranes the size of a roofing nail head proclaim him a male. From snout to rump, he's nearly five inches long; in full leap, he'd stretch another five. He's a big frog.

It's hard to believe that only a year and four days ago, he first hauled himself out of the water and onto a new red lily leaf in my little backyard water garden here in southeastern Ohio.

June 1, 1994: A pickle jar, aswarm with seven fat bullfrog tadpoles, arrives. Friends have brought them from their farm pond to enliven the 200-gallon pondlet Bill dug for me on the first of May. I watch them squiggle, judging all to be in their second year of tadhood. (Bullfrogs require two seasons as tadpoles; the transformation comes in their second summer of life.) I tip them into the pond, and they disappear in its olive depths.

June 17: The tadpoles are the size of apricots, but still no legs show.

July 14: I return from a trip to South Africa to find them sporting big hind legs, and the buds of front legs! It won't be long now.

July 17: Their tails are starting to shrink away, and all four legs now dangle in the water. Their eyes are getting bulbous, and they look distinctly froggy.

July 26: A new bullfroglet sits proudly on a red lily leaf. He's so much larger than the others, all still tadpoles, that I name him Big Fergus. Fergus seems such a fine name for a frog that I name the rest Medium, Little, and Tiny Fergus. Dumb, but effective.

August 1: I resolve to hand-tame the frogs. Placing mealworms on a flat rock in Big Fergus' sightline, I wait, froglike, hunkered at poolside. He swims over and engulfs them, starting his career as a professional freeloader.

August 4: I enjoy daily feedings with Big Fergus. Despite my efforts, the other froglets, which have since transformed, never learn to connect me with delicious mealworms, or are naturally too shy to take advantage of the offering. Big Fergus is clearly Überfrog.

By summer's end, I can smoothly slide my palm under Big Fergus, and hold him up to admire his froggy grin. He's quite a creature, swimming up expectantly whenever I appear, spurning the attentions of strangers. No dunderhead, he. I am fond of him, shameless about making a pet of him, though I know his to be cupboard love, nothing more.

October comes, and I have to clean my little ecosystem, for although the water is clear, great swirling clouds of sediment rise when the koi snuffle along its bottom. On the 12th I clean the pool, netting all the fish and their myriad offspring, and catching four frogs, all that made it of the seven tadpoles. I put them in a big plastic tub and set about draining and scrubbing. Looking over to check, there is Big Fergus, arms hanging over the tub edge. He gathers his hind legs onto the rim and launches a glorious arc, three feet through the cool fall air and splat! into the now-empty pool that once was his refuge. That had to hurt.

I catch him and return him to the tub, putting a garbage can lid on to contain him. I hear him thunking against it the whole time I labor in the pool. Returned at last to the sparkling clean pond, he hides for a whole week, sulking, I imagine.

By the second of November, the fish are motionless on pondbottom, and the frogs are no longer heard. A stillness settles over the pool. Ice creeps over its surface, and I keep the pump running so the water will stay at least partly open. Snow drifts over the ice, making an igloo out of the fountain, and I hear only a trickle beneath. I wonder how the frogs are faring, and marvel at the great evolutionary distance between us, pet or no: Fergus stays under that snow and ice, on the pond's bottom, for months at a time, stilled like a run-down clock, but he is alive. I stick my hand in the water to experience his parallel world. Pain shoots up my arm like fire before three seconds are up, and I have to run inside and turn on the hot water tap to warm it. I hope he's all right down there.

Winter slithers by, finally sighs, and gives over to spring. Woodcocks peent and whirl over the meadow. Finally comes The Day: March 18, clear, in the 60s, and warm enough for me to don shorts and wade into the pond. Silt swirls again. I decide to clean it of winter's ooze, and make a mental note to forget the fall cleaning next year. All four frogs have made it through; I feel them against my toes in the muck. I repeat the exercise with the tub, forget to lid it, only to have Big Fergus splat into the empty pond at my feet once more. Has he grown over the winter? He looks enormous, but he's all dark olive drab, the color of wet bark, without the bright green head of summer. It will be the 10th of May before he feels up to eating his mealworms, and then we continue the daily feedings as before. I can almost see him grow.

May 16, 1995: Fergus voices his first tentative mating call, rumm rumm rumm, waking us at dawn. I wonder whether it's a good idea to have a big male bullfrog in residence right under the bedroom windows. Luckily, he's too young to be in full voice and gives it up after a few days.

Big seems to be more and more voracious. Today, June 13, he mistakes my pinky finger for a mealworm and tries valiantly to stuff it down his great throat with his four-fingered hands. I feel the viselike serrated edges of his jaws and am glad to pull my finger out of his mouth, flipping him into the pond with a laugh. Still, there was something chilling about his strength; I remember the same shiver in my bones when a praying mantis I was feeding grabbed me instead of the grasshopper I offered her. She bent her triangular head and began to gnaw on my finger, and I got a flash of what it must be like to be prey.

June 22: I look down from the bedroom window to see Fergus gaily bow-tied by the wings of a great spangled fritillary as it disappears down his throat. More and more, he sits facing the sweet william, which is covered with the orange butterflies, launching himself up into it to snag them. It doesn't seem to make any difference how many mealworms I give him; he's insatiable, seeming to turn each meal into a half-inch of girth and length. The tall yellow coreopsis, bigger than a bushel basket and covered with buds, bursts into bloom at poolside, and the fritillaries swarm onto it, too. Little by little, the side of the coreopsis that faces the pond is denuded, as Big hurls himself into it, amputating the flowers as he snaps shut on swallowtails and fritillaries, pearl crescents and sulfurs. This is not good; this is not what I'd envisioned. I have planted a death garden for butterflies.

A July morning, and I am cleaning the pond filter when I notice a tiny, white-tipped hummingbird tail feather afloat on the surface of the pool. Then another, and another, until I retrieve all 10. The shafts are bent in the same place, just above their tips, so I know the feathers were pulled out with force, and all at one time. I glare at Fergus, who regards me impassionately and swims closer with an easy flex of his great webs. When he's hungry, his sides sink in and his back ridges stand up like a bridge superstructure. But this morning, his sides are full and round. There's a young ruby-throated hummingbird in there, and I don't need X-ray spectacles to know it.

I wonder at the chances of Fergus' catching another hummingbird. Maybe it was a fluke, a chance snag, never to be repeated. The butterflies are bad enough, but I can't have him eating the hummingbirds we feed and encourage with bee balm and trumpet vine, fuchsia and coralbells. Only a week later I am shocked to find yet another set of tail feathers floating. A frog dropping floats beside them. I retrieve it and find it packed with feathers. They dry in the sun, glinting iridescent green: another hummingbird has gone to fuel Fergus' habit. My blood chills. I realize that Fergus' constant station just beneath the pink water-lily blossoms has little to do with froggy aesthetics, and everything to do with catching curious hummingbirds. What have I done?

August 2: I've been attempting to swamp Fergus with food, as if that were possible. He turns it all into brawn. I lean down to pick up a huge grasshopper, his favorite fare of late, and look for Fergus under his shady rock ledge, where he retreats when the sun grows hot. He is there, and there is something sticking out of his mouth. Feathers. With a strangled cry, I move over and slip my hand up under him to get a closer look. He's having none of it, and dives deeply beneath the silent lily pads. Soon he pops up, and I unceremoniously grab his fat hind legs with one hand, the bird's tail with the other. I work it back up out of his gullet, far enough to see that it's a chipping sparrow, and it's quite dead. Furious, I race up the basement stairs, frog in fist, giving Fergus his first and last tour of the house. I grab my camera to fire off a couple of shots of the culprit, caught. Still in my grip, he gulps once, and the sparrow's tail and limp foot vanish. His sides are very round now. I plop him in a pickle jar, the same one he arrived in as a tadpole, and plan his future.

The pond seemed so right with a bullfrog as its animus. He might have been cast of bronze for his color and sheen, but for his glorious gold-flecked eyes. I was very fond of him, and proud of myself for hand-taming him. I even staged a couple of snapshots of myself kissing him on his hard lips; the princess and her prince. Now, I could throttle him. I'm confused. I'll stand at the kitchen window, agog and aglow, as a sharp-shinned hawk snags a goldfinch from the feeder, and applaud its prowess even as I feel a twinge of remorse for the finch. Why am I so furious at Fergus? Why do I feel so betrayed? Fergus is just being a frog, as the sharpshin is being a hawk. Bullfrogs, I have come to learn, eat birds. Bullfrogs, in fact, eat anything they can cram in their mouths. They live by simple rules. If it moves, and you can swallow it, eat it.

I think the root of my horror is this: I thought I had control over my little ecosystem. I change the filter to keep the water clear, feed the fish sparingly, plant lots of underwater and floating vegetation for cover and breeding, keep the pump running to boost the oxygen content of the water. I conduct water changes to refresh the pond when it's hot and muggy, net out the baby shubunkin goldfish to sell or give away, divide the plants when they threaten to choke the water. I brought in bullfrogs because they seemed a natural part of this aquatic world. I figured they'd snag crickets and grasshoppers that sun on the rocks, and they did. But Fergus had plans of his own. Bullfrogs will be bullfrogs. They're not top-of-the-line predators, but in my little biosphere, they're darn close.

The sharpshin flying free and the bullfrog in my palm are not so very different, and I can't blame either for finding its natural prey. It is I who have set up this microcosm where birds flock to feeders and sparrows bathe at the water's edge next to shady ledges, where hummingbirds buzz and hover over scented lilies, where death waits just beneath the surface. Our pond is the only water for perhaps a quarter-mile around, and in a dry summer, as all summers here seem to be, it's mobbed with birds, delighted to find a splashing fountain on withered old Scott's Ridge.

Fergus is a spider with a four-by-six foot web. He's got to go.

I make a couple of sketches of him as he sits and pulsates. I will miss him, but I won't miss the floating tail feathers or the sinking feeling I've been getting whenever a bird drinks at water's edge. I call our neighbors and ask permission to release a large bullfrog in their farm pond, explaining a little sheepishly what has happened. It won't be the first time our neighbors have scratched their heads over me, nor the last. They consent, graciously.

Fergus and I trek over an alfalfa field down to the pond, I puffing, he sloshing in his jar. It seems barren, devoid of emergent vegetation. A classic farm pond, just a hole in the ground with some water in it, and a neatly weed-whacked edge. Still, I see some pondweed just below the surface, and lots of insects on the water, and I figure Fergus can make it here. His chances of snagging birds will be greatly diluted by many more square yards of shoreline, and fewer places to lurk unseen.

I tip the jar, and Fergus hesitates. I nudge him out into the water, and he just sits. This does not compute in his tiny brain; this is not his home. Come on, Ferg, I coax. Just swim away, and I'll be done with you. In the end, I have to toss him into deeper water, and he dives slowly, then pops up in the featureless pond, as plain as a pimple on a cover girl. Oh, dear. Now, what have I done? This frog knows nothing about predators. What's the opposite of a Midas touch, I wonder, because I have it. I caused the demise of who knows how many hummingbirds and sparrows and fritillaries, and now I'm screwing up this frog's future. He's too far out to retrieve, and I reluctantly turn for home. Good night, sweet prince.

Back home, the pond seems quiet and sad without its thrumming tyrant. The three smaller frogs surface rarely; they're hardly big enough to swallow a cricket, much less a bird. It was a grand run, Fergus, I muse; you have to hand me that. You grew more in a year than most frogs do in their lives. We had some fun, then you had to go and spoil it. I'm humbled by it all, hit by the realization that nature will assert itself whatever we wish or plan. You put up a feeder, you get a sharpshin strafing it; you dig a pond and put tadpoles in it, name one and hand-tame him, and he thanks you by turning hummingbirds into frog muscle. Still, I wish him the best, and hope he makes it, a not-so-big frog in a very large pond.

The next afternoon, I drive slowly by Fergus' new home, searching the water's edge for his familiar shape. There is a great blue heron standing on the shore, looking out over the smooth water.

Postscript: Fergus' Leap from Grace

It's been almost two years since Fergus was banished. That same October, when the migrating warblers paused to drink and bathe at the pool, Medium Fergus took it upon himself to off a yellow-rumped warbler. Out came the net, and into a cooler went Medium, Little, and Tiny Fergus. A frogfest. They were taken to a park with a cattail-choked pond where I'm sure they're toasting yet with jugs o' rum.

Spring 1996 was frogless, until a couple of pairs of American toads decided to trill and spin their gooey strings of eggs around the pond. The koi and goldfish ate all but a few of the tadpoles. That won't stop the toads, who never seem to check to see what became of their eggs, but just lay more.

1996 was a wet year, and frogs were on the move. To my great delight, two green frogs, smaller, less bird-lethal cousins of the bullfrog, moved in and made the pond their new home. I thrilled to the off-tune banjo twang and the low growls of the little greens, and their funny, froggy YIKES! when I'd walk by the pond.

Come spring of 1997, warm days would find the two green frogs sitting on rock ledges around the pond. Had I waited, they'd have come; there was no need to import bullfrogs. They look fine sitting there, or floating on the surface, and I've grown fond of them. But I'm not going to feed them, or tame them; it's enough that they're here. Lesson learned.

There are a lot of water gardens in America, and I'd bet that many of them have a resident bullfrog or two. The tadpoles are even sold by the big water garden supply houses, touted as part of the "cleaning crew," eating algae along with scavenging snails. I don't know how many water gardeners attach any significance to a few tail feathers floating on their ponds; fewer still probably dry and dissect frog droppings or happen to catch a bullfrog red-handed, stuffing a bird down its gullet. But it might behoove all of us to watch for signs of frog predation, and to think twice before introducing this voracious predator to our miniature Edens.