This poster is by talented 13-year old
Harshitha Mattapally, of India
One of the many ponds in our area-
much larger, of course, than the one in my poem,
which I picture in a corner of a freshly clearcut area,
zoned for condominiums
Mother Frog is singing her spring song,
as she lays her frogspawn
along the edges of the pond.
Deep in the bullrushes,
she sinks into a sleepy, contented torpor,
dreaming of all the little tadpoles
who will soon be waking
into their first spring.
But wait!
She is startled awake
as the ground shakes beneath her,
toppled off her lily-pad
into the water,
where she hops up quickly
to the top of a log
to see
-horrors!-
a yellow bulldozer
heading her way,
its giant claw raised,
then tipping
a load of loose dirt -
pond, mom and babies,
all gone
as it then backs away.
Hannah has set us a cool challenge over at Real Toads for her Transforming Fridays : to write about the endangered frog species for Save the Frogs day. Great prompt, Hannah. I learned a lot. If we are going to save these necessary creatures, we need to be informed.
At Save the Frogs I learned amphibians are the most endangered group of animals on the planet. No wonder, with habitat destruction, pesticides and pollution, global warming and climate change all contributing to their distress. Not to mention the appalling $40 million trade in frogs-legs.
"For 250 million years, this hardy species outlived dinosaurs, ice ages, volcanic eruptions and asteroid crashes," says Save the Frogs director Kerry Kriger. "Yet in the last 50 years, we have driven one third of the species to the verge of extinction."
A whole new dismal slant on why "it isn't easy being green."
