Raising Tadpoles

I want to be a good mom. I want to be the kind of mom who helps her children discover the beauty and wonder of nature.

A couple months ago, I kidnapped a clump of frog eggs from some wetlands in a local park, brought them home, and put them in a fishtank out back of our garage. I had no idea how many I had brought home. When the eggs all hatched, I probably had about 200 of the little guys in our tank.

I read up on them on the 'net' and discovered that they required fresh, clean, chemical free water. You could feed them cooked lettuce, but that they might turn cannibalistic if overcrowded. When they finally grew their back legs, they would need something to crawl out of the water onto, else drown (I guess).

In spite of my excitement I had for our little science project, I began to feel twinges of guilt. I did not want to see them eating each other. I wanted them [all] to live. But when it came time for them to spread their legs and hop away, there was no frog apartments with a fresh water pond nearby for them to move into after moving out of the tank. I would have to take them back to the park when the time came.

We do have a creek, though, and to spare myself the trauma of watching them eat each other, I got lazy and dumped half of them in the creek. I knew full well that they would all get swept away when the first real rain came, but told myself that at least they had a chance of surviving this way.

We soon discovered that I must have scooped up a pre-hatched tadpole along with the eggs. He was bigger than the rest, with his back legs already sprouted. With much enthusiasm, the family monitored his growth over the next few weeks. One day we noticed that his arms had suddenly appeared, and the next, his tail was nearly gone. He spent one more day climbing the side of the tank and a brick I had placed for him, then the next day, he was gone.

Hardly bigger than a dime, he had ventured into the wide world of our back yard full of snakes, lizards, and who knows what other menaces. Didn't he know I was planning to take him back to the wetlands in the next few days? I thought I had told him so. Wracked with guilt, I loaded the rest of the tadpoles up in a bucket the next day, and Finley and I took them back to the park.

The scene was surreal. Nestled back in a thicket of trees, was a perfectly clear little pond, lined with last fall's leaves. Snatches of sunlight danced on the water while a myriad of tadpoles played beneath the surface. I gently poured my captives back out into sweet freedom...