The frog was fast – bouncing from one side of the tree stump den to the other – but the garter snake was faster. It struck like lightning. Poor frog.
We think the snake was a small black-necked garter snake and we know the frog was a Rio Grande chirping frog.
Chirping frogs are tiny – less than an inch long (~ 2 cm). They arrived in our backyard only about 7 or 8 years ago – we’d never had them here before then – and they announced their arrival with their surprisingly loud, irregular, nocturnal chirping sounds. It took us a month or so to even figure out that the newly arrived chirping critters were frogs; at first we wondered if they might be bugs, or perhaps strange nocturnal birds.
Although we hear chirping frogs all the time, we’ve never seen one in the flesh. However, our cameras often catch them in the dens. We rarely see snakes in the flesh, either, but our cameras go where we cannot (and they stay up a lot later). They show us a world that we would otherwise be blind to.
#texasbackyardwildlife
2 Comments
enjoying the videos, especially the foxes! I love hummingbirds but thought that male black-chinned went too far in attacking the female!
Thank you so much for your note, Jill. We have a lot of fun watching the critters – Dan has cameras everywhere and we see some fascinating things. We’ve been watching a fox family on the livestream for the past week, which has been great. We agree with you about the male hummingbirds – they can be extremely bossy and we strenuously disapprove.