Another sleepless night of canines and croakers, but let’s start by setting the scene.
I have 3 dogs – a collie, a kelpie and a heeler – all former farm dogs, and hence they live outside. But they all hate thunder and lightning (and noisy aircraft, low flying balloons, fireworks, sirens, ‘bangs’ of any description, and the other dogs getting more pats than they do!).
So when Zeus coughs and sneezes, day or night, the dogs go spare: the 15-year-old kelpie scratches at the door, the collie cries and the heeler barks. The kelpie is the worst; he’s obsessive, furiously dragging his long claws across the unfortunate door till someone lets him into the small laundry, where he snuggles up into his wet weather blanket.
If no one is at home, and the Big Z decides to hang around, the kelpie just keeps scratching! And that’s what happened on Christmas Day when the human household headed off for celebrations elsewhere, in my case, to a family function in Sydney.
A previous owner had installed a cat flap in the laundry door. When the thunder and lighting started, the kelpie got stuck into the door with his usual enthusiasm. With no humans inside to let him in, he just kept on going, and as his sharp claws assailed the cat flap frame, the 4 screws holding it in place eventually gave way, and the frame fell out.
Buoyed by his success, the brown dog then started chewing the masonite door itself. Fortunately, he didn’t open the door flap. Based on past experience, he would probably have stuck his head inside and got stuck!
As it was, when I returned that night, I was greeted by a very wet and tired kelpie, lying in a pile of wooden chips that used to be the laundry door (see pic above). New door required.
Back to the title of the post. A previous owner also installed a water feature comprising a series of 3 cascading ponds, the water being reticulated through the ponds by an electric pump. The feature is close to the house, beside the patio. I found the long-dead remains of the pump while exploring the ponds, now overgrown with a mass of protective vegetation. And, to my joy, the first heavy rain after I moved in revealed the presence of a family of frogs, happily croaking in their flooded home.
January 2015 has been exceptionally wet and humid in Canberra. We have exceeded our average January rainfall in less than half the month, with much of the downpours coming in evening thunderstorms. It doesn’t matter whether its 10 pm, midnight or 2 am, when Zeus comes, the kelpie scratches, and Bruce gets up and lets him into the laundry through the still-to-be-repaired door. The trick to then keeping him quiet on these stormy, flashy nights is to leave the laundry light on, as the lightning doesn’t seem to bother him then.
So the storm passes, the kelpie shuts up, the humans snooze, and … its time for the frogs to party, revelling and whooping in the latest deluge, sounding like an orchestra of poorly tuned banjos.
Frog pond with blobs of tadpole eggs.
And what a night, what an orgy, it must have been ‘down in the ponds’ as morning revealed masses of white eggs with tiny black tadpoles in them: future croakers.
Happy travelling.