Guady Leaf Frog

 

OK, it has officially been WAY too long since I posted here!  It has been a crazy and wonderful summer getting married in May, going on a honeymoon to Costa Rica, teaching summer session 2, and then getting ready for the new school year. Tomorrow is the first day of classes and I think I might actually be ready.  So, here is a picture to start things off again.  Courtney and I had a fantastic time in Costa Rica and I will post several pictures here over the next little while.  Courtney has a great set of blog posts describing the trip if you'd like to check them out here, here, here, here, here, and here.  The first place we visited, Lapa Rios was one of my favorites!  It is a great resort near the Corcovado National Park and there is an incredible amount of wildlife there. One the last night I went on a night hike and say lots of nifty things.  Now, most were spiders and other creepy crawlies, but I did get to see one of these Red-eyed Tree Frog (or Gaudy Leaf Frog) hanging around on a branch.  I was very happy to be able to find one of these in the wild--most cool!  He is a little guy--only a couple inches long but nifty!

 

Final Fernbank froggy friends.

More Froggy Friends

Some more froggy friends from Fernbank!!

Hello, I am a cute little froggy!

In September of 2007 Courtney and I headed over to the Fernbank Science museum to check it out--being the nerd that I am it kinda surprises me that it took me a year to get to the museum! Though somewhat smaller than similar museums in Chicago and San Francisco of course, it is still a great science museum with a good amount of hands-on exhibits and some fun variations of some classics. We went to the museum on that particular weekend as there was a special exhibit on the color of frogs. It was a bit challenging getting pictures through the glass and around all the little kids (and finger/nose prints!), but it was fun trying. Here are a couple of my favorites with more to come in the next post.

Clear as a Bell

Back to Africa and Botswana for today's post. We had been traveling for a couple of weeks and one of the constants throughout the different countries we visited was that at night you could hear a very distinctive frog call that sounded just like the ringing of a bell. The sound was actually very loud and evidentially traveled long distances easily. Turns out all that loud noise was made by some pretty tiny frogs! The African reed frog, or bell frog was the culprit and when were exploring the Okavango delta by canoe (mokoro) we finally found some. The first picture os of a female and then next two are males. For a sense of scale, they are ounly a couple inches long.