Tsunami '04

Four years ago, I moved house on this day and a tsunami belted Indonesia. Today, it's much cooler and more peaceful and I don't think anything (else) is happening to Indonesia either.

Greetings to all, especially agoodliedown and stephen_dedman whom I hope to see at a more respectable hour :-) Strangely enough, after the total peace of Christmas Day, I feel I'd actually like to see people today!

Amphibian kidnap

My friends and landlords have a swimming pool with a few feet of green water in it. Frogs love it! It is filled with tadpoles every year. My efforts early this year to populate my pond didn't work very well. Either most tads didn't survive or they grew up and left, leaving me with one confirmed frog, possibly two, who may no longer be with us. [See kookaburra note, below.]

To replenish the supply, I went fishing today, since I'm watering and checking on my friends' house for them while they're away. Despite being very sleepy and hanging around the surface of the water like scores of inky blobs with eyes, the tads woke up and moved when I began attempting to scoop them out this morning.

I must have taken up to an hour to catch six of them, ranging from small to almost-a-frog. They survived the ride home in a sealed container and are now swimming a bit dazedly around the pond in company with the minnow school. I hope that the fact that I managed to catch these six out of literally hundreds of tads doesn't mean that I'll have the six dopiest frogs in the suburb.

My pond is well established now, being a year old, which it wasn't at the first attempt, so perhaps that's a contributing factor to the initial failure. There's also much more cover now in the form of water plants and floating pond weed and more growth around the pond for when the frogs leave the water. I have seen a kookaburra swoop into the pond and take something, not too long ago, so there is continuing threat. I know these birds are good at what they do but was still surprised that it managed to do so in an area of only two feet depth and not much more open width. Let's hope the rest of the water-dwellers increase their vigilance!