“This frog’s not even supposed to be here”
Hi. This is the story of a frog of many names. Some people know this frog as Goji. Some people know this frog as Earl Grey. Others know it as Grog. This frog came into my life a couple years ago when I moved into a new house with some friends and we knew we wanted some sort of animal, so I went with, with my friend [name] and his boyfriend [name] to, to the pet store, thinking we were probably going to get a turtle, but then we overheard the staff talking and they were like, “Blah blah blah, there’s like, this frog that came in on our new vegetable shipment”, like the vegetables that they feed the other animals and it’s like, “This frog’s not even supposed to be here, and we need to get rid of it.”
And this is an American Bullfrog, and this is in California where American Bullfrogs are not native. They’re, they’re very invasive and they cause a lot of problems for the ecosystem, so they could not ethically release this frog into the wild. And they were like, “We’re gonna have to kill this frog, that’s so sad.” And we were like, “Hey, we are looking for an animal, can we have that frog?” and they said “Yes.” And we took the frog home and then realized we don’t really know how to take care of a frog, no one in our, in our little trio, had frog experience, as of yet. Luckily, it turns out American Bullfrogs will eat pretty much anything that moves.
We started off with crickets that we got from that same pet store. But this was not a super sustainable solution, because crickets don’t live super long, and we needed to feed this frog on a regular basis, and, and we did not have access to a car to go get more crickets from the pet store, which was very far, and I mean, like I — my first assumption was like, “Oh, there are like — there’s like pet stores all around. We can get food for the frog.” That was false. There were very few pet stores in over vicinity. We had to go very far on a quest for crickets every time — every time we needed to get them. So then I was thinking, like maybe we can just forage food. Maybe we can get like worms from, we had like a big backyard compost, and that worked for like a little bit during the wet season. The frog actually does enjoy the worms quite a bit, but that was also not a sustainable solution because soon the compost ran dry, drier than in the wet season and, and then there were no more worms.
And, oh also this frog was very loud. It kept like waking me up at night because its croak was just like, so insane and resonant. And that was really fun. I liked being woken up by the frog, but it also got annoying over time. Anyway, yeah, eventually I felt like I could not really care for this frog properly so I wrote to a bunch of different people and said, “Who wants this frog?” And my friend [name] said “I want this frog.” And she took the frog but then she was like, “You know what? I can’t really care for this either.” And she said, “Hey, [name].” That’s another person. “Do you want this frog?” And [name] said, “Yes.” So now that frog lives with [name]. And I am not really in contact with [name], so I’m just going to assume that everything is okay and the frog is alive. And yeah, I hope the best for Earl Grey slash Goji slash Grog. Thank you for listening.
