Bullfrogs in the Snow

Bullfrog season is open! I might go down to my pond soon and grab a couple to eat. Usually, when you read a natural history account, it discusses the basic things you find in a nature book of some type, like when the bird or animal migrates or hibernates, how many young it has, and what it eats. People who write such things often live in a town or city and get their information from a book someone else wrote long ago. When I was a kid I read where bullfrogs lay about five or six thousand eggs and I set out to see if that was correct. I found a big bunch of frog eggs in a little backwater slough and began to count them, and I was up around four or five hundred when something distracted me, so I never did get a completed count. I have decided to go with what the book says.

I can say for sure that tadpoles hatch from the eggs and begin, in time to sprout legs and slowly, throughout the course of the summer, become a small bullfrog. The book says that in about two years, that little frog will be a full grown, eating-size bullfrog about 5 inches long. It says that bullfrogs only get to be about 6- or 7-inches long, and I don’t buy that at all. I know I have caught some that were 8 or 9 inches long and 18 inches long with their legs stretched out.

Ol’ Bill Stalder, down at the pool hall when I was a kid, said he had seen ‘em 24- inches long when he was younger, and I can tell you that Ol’ Bill knew more about river critters than whoever wrote those books. You remember seeing that picture of the heron trying to swallow a bullfrog, and the bullfrog hanging out the big birds beak with it’s front feet wrapped around the heron’s neck trying to choke it to death…? Well Ol’ Bill actually seen something like that happen once.

I know from studying bullfrogs on my own that they will eat about anything they can, and they eat both at night and during the daytime. I never recall ever seeing one asleep; never saw one that wouldn’t eat whenever the opportunity presented itself. They really can unroll that tongue out there and nail an insect before them, and they can also swim up to a crawdad under water and eat it too. I imagine they prefer crawdads to about anything when they can get them, but then, a pond bullfrog which has no crawdads in his pond has to settle for insects or small fish or small snakes. A bullfrog is a little like some of my relatives on my mother’s side, he will eat whatever he can get, whatever comes along that looks capable of being swallowed.

Bullfrogs usually fatten up and hibernate in the muck or mud somewhere, and that is to me one of the most amazing things when you think of it. They just sense when it is time to burrow in somewhere and when spring comes along they wake up and get back to a normal life. Think about that this Christmas when there’s about a foot of snow on the ground…. down at the river, there are dozens of bullfrogs snoozing away in a foot or so of frozen mud, not breathing or eating, with about one heartbeat every three days.

From my own experiences with bullfrogs, without consulting the books, they are very prolific, lead a fairly boring life, miss the whole winter sleeping but stay awake all summer, can jump the full length of a johnboat, eat almost everything that is smaller than they are and feed almost everything larger than they are including me. Their deep bellowing call adds a great deal to an Ozark river on a summer night. It wouldn’t be the same without them.

I was watching one of those nature shows from the British Broadcasting channel and actually saw this or I wouldn’t believe it either. They showed big bullfrogs in the French Alps, which is where my ancestors came from, poking their heads up out of a snow bank in the spring, coming out of hibernation. There were a dozen or so of them and they emerged to slide down a hillside of snow and into a small pool of freezing water. They seemed to enjoy that slide over the snow. Watching slick, wet bullfrogs sliding several hundred yards down a snow covered hillside was a jaw-dropping experience for a naturalist like me that thought he knew everything about bull-frogs. Even Ol’ Bill Stalder wouldn’t have believed that.

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