Wild Wednesday ~ Little Visitor

A few of weeks ago, as a nor'easter prepared to blow through, I dragged all our houseplants inside. We'd already had a couple of frosts, and, though the plants were mostly protected by the exhuberant growth of a kiwi vine that's taken over our deck in a Little Shop of Horrors-esque fashion, they were starting to glare at me in an accusatory fashion for neglecting them.

The next day, I heard a strange and surprising sound coming from the sunroom, where the plants live: Peep-peep-peep-peep.

I knew that spring peepers occassionally call during the waning days of fall, lamenting, I assume, the onset of winter. I did not know that they occassionally take up residence in houseplants and thereby move into the homes of unsuspecting humans.

I scurried to the sunroom, but the peeping had stopped by the time I got there, and with a couple dozen plants, all overgrown from a summer outdoors, there was no way I was going to find a frog the size of my thumbnail. And so it went over the next week: Peep-peep-peep-peep. Scurry. Silence. I tried playing a peeper chorus from my frog songs CD. I tried combing out dead leaves from the plants and pruning back excessive vegetation. I tried misting them with water to imitate a light rain. No luck.

Finally, after about a week, I made it to the sunroom in time to narrow the call down to the southeast corner. I took the plants from that corner and spread them out, and thus triangulated my way to the call the next time I heard it, finding the little scamp hiding under the succulent leaf of an aloe vera plant. At this point it was late in the day and getting a little chilly out, and I decided to wait until the warmest part of the following day to escort the stowaway outside. Unfortunately, when I went to release him, I found he had absconded to another plant and again I couldn't find him.

I was a little worried that the frog was getting dehydrated, so I lightly watered the plants and waited for the giveaway peep-peep. But it came less frequently and for shorter intervals than it had before. Had I squandered its last chance for survival? Finally, one day nearly a week after I first found the frog, I was able to narrow the call down to a small area of the room and found the peeper hiding between the inner and outer pot of another aloe vera plant.

It was a cold, damp day, but I wasn't taking any chances with the frog relocating itself again, so I took it outside, across the driveway, released it among the damp leaves that it's so well-camouflaged with, and wished it well in its upcoming hibernation and return next spring.