So much for moonlit walks

I’m going to miss our late night walks but, for the forseeable future, we will have to content ourselves with sunset walks.

Frogs, you see, huge ones with bumpy skins, are invading the roads.

Overgrown grass, especially on vacant lots, were cut down by the village’s maintenance crew. It’s SOP, really. Tall grass can conceal garbage (intentionally dumped or not) and, worse, wild animals.

A stray civet was recently spotted on a CCTV camera and it’s not something you want lurking near your property. While many species survive on fruits, others prey on small animals. When a resident reported the theft of her pet lovebirds, a neighbor suggested that it might have been devoured by the civet (it was not because the cage showed no traces of blood and feather).

But… back to the sunset walks and the frog story. So, when the grass was cut (the noise of the grasscutter killed my ears intermittently for a few days), the frogs lost their home. I can’t say I’m sympathetic to their plight (I don’t like frogs) but, without overgrown grass and bushes to hide in, they strayed toward the roads. And we almost stepped on a huge one while another seemed to be looking straight at us from the sidewalk. Dog jumped. Daughter shrieked. That was the last moonlit walk we took.

The following day, Alex suggested going out before sunset. The heat starts dissipating at that time so the air is cooler and friendlier to the skin. More importantly, it’s still light enough to spot frogs on the road. In the tropics, the sunset lasts for about 22 minutes (I timed it once with a camera) depending on the season. If we synchronize our daily walk with the sunset, we’d be back in the house before it gets fully dark.

Of course, being able to avoid frogs on our walks doesn’t mean we can avoid them completely and permanently. This is the tropics and the thicker vegetation in the burbs means there are more here than in the city. And they venture inside houses.

If there was a place on this planet where there are no frogs (and lizards), Alex would probably consider moving. But frogs live in just about every region from the hot tropics to the freezing subartic zone (Antarctica is frog-free though). So, we just co-exist with them. They eat mosquitoes so they serve a purpose in the ecosystem.