I'll put off posting the high tunnel construction progress pictures (all bows up!) to share this incredibly beautiful little creature. It was under the floating row cover on a bed soon to be in the high tunnel.
I always seem to make the mistake of catching a critter like this in my right hand, leaving my left hand to operate the camera. The camera is, of course, designed to be operated by the right hand, so it's pretty awkward. This darling was a good sport about the delays, but very curious. Hoever I turned my hand, it would turn to look at the camera! I had no idea frogs' backbones could be so flexible.
The photo simply fails to do justice to the color of this tiny frog. It shone like polished metal in the bright sun--irridescent metallic, like a metal flake paint job on a car.
If anyone knows the species, please share it as a comment, ideally with a link to an online photo. It's much smaller than our usual gray tree frog.
I hope it will have a happy winter in the hoop house.
3 comments:
What a cutie! Great picture, too, even though it wasn't as detailed as you'd have liked it to be. I love frogs. I have no idea what species it could possibly be, though.
Here's a likely identification for it: the Boreal Chorus Frog, Pseudacris maculata. This is the actual source of the familiar "spring peeper" frog choruses on spring nights of a certain temperature--as the web page describes it, it sounds like a fingernail on a comb. Check it out at http://webcat.fhsu.edu/ksfauna/herps/index.asp?page=species&species_id=420-942&dots=yes&tributaries=yes&isAnura=&map=ks
Could be. I just did a Google image search for the little guy and the pictures that came up were very similar to the one you posted.
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