I'm lucky enough to live out in the country on 29.9 acres, with the part surrounding our house being in a very wild state. When I parked my car today, this guy was looking at me from the wall. I set him on some leaf litter and took this picture.
Jabba The Hutt?
No, as you can likely tell from the pine needles, he was only about an inch and a half long - a common tree frog. It was nice to catch a picture of him, though, before he adjusted his camoflage to become part of the scenery.
A couple of thoughts struck me when I looked at this picture this evening.
To us, a tree frog is a tree frog, but my guess is that the individual markings we see around his mouth and eyes make this little fellow just as much an individual to his fellow frogs as we are to each other. And then my realtor self reflects on the thought that we never deal with generic "clients". Every person we meet is different, as is every solution, as we try to help them take the next important step in their lives.
My second thought was that I was really, really happy to see this little fellow on our property. Miners used to carry canaries into the mines to provide an early warning of when noxious gases might prove fatal. We now know that the greatly endangered amphibian population on this planet is telling us that we need to be much more cautious about how we are affecting the environment, for ourselves and all of the world's creatures.
These are large messages, but for now I need to settle back to enjoying my close encounter of the green kind today. I am happy that our place provides a good home for this fellow, and all his froggy freinds who live in and around our goldfish pond.
I hope that my grandchildren will also grow to live in a world they can share with creatures like these.
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