We have lots of frogs down here in Florida. I like frogs very much and enjoy encountering them on my own terms, i.e., outside, where they belong, and from a cozy distance.
See, we’ve had boundary issues, frogs and me. It’s been suggested in some quarters that perhaps I take these unexpected frog assaults a little too personally and have become a bit paranoid about their propensity for popping up to surprise me in unlikely places.
I’d like to see how these critics would react to this kind of scenario on their turf. What’s pictured below is the console of a sadly neglected exercise bike that lives on my back porch:
And yes, that’s a goddamned frog coming out of a hole in the exercise bike console:
Are there critters in your neck of the woods who pop out to surprise you? Discuss! Or talk about whatever.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
Omnes Omnibus
You have a frog vending machine? Is it a Florida thing?
Odie Hugh Manatee
Yup, deer. I have to weave the car through them almost every morning. They are busy cleaning out the neighborhood. Same with the raccoons, they’re all over the place here. Goats happen by on occasion, but only late at night/early am.
I had a skunk come in the garage and stand right next to where I was sitting at my desk, reading online here (I even posted about it when it happened). We have a black cat and I usually reach down without looking to scratch his head as he passes by in my peripheral vision. For some reason, that time I looked and saw the business end of the skunk pointing directly at my left leg.
I scrambled out of that garage so fucking fast… Luckily I escaped without spooking the skunk or getting perfumed.
gravie
Stink bugs are a plague in the mid-Atlantic region. You find them crawling on everything, everywhere — inside the dryer, in your jewelry box, on your hanger clothes, for heaven’s sake. They’re tiny, evil-looking prehistoric monsters and if you are ever foolish enough to squeeze one, trying to get it out of the house, it releases an incredibly foul odor. Gak. I hate them.
Randy P
Crickets. When I was a kid, I loved crickets. They were cute and came in black or green (or maybe the green ones were grasshoppers). I’d spend hours trying to locate them by their chirp and then catch them.
But these crickets are big and bloated and a colorless sort of brown. They look like reanimated Steven King zombie versions of the crickets I used to love.
Fortunately they’re also slow and stupid. So a lot of them meet a horrible end.
Linda Featheringill
Ah, yes. The competition for space between humans and other critters that goes on in Dixie. One more reason I chose to be a damnyankee.
liberal
There’s lots of lizards and salamanders, too, right?
Be careful, though—I’ve heard those frogs pack heat, and it being FL and all…
MadRuth
A couple of weeks ago I went out on my front porch with a glass of wine to watch the bluebirds building a nest. Our porch has a row of 4 captains chairs and I sat in the one which gave me the best view of the bird house. Mr. MR came out about 20 minutes later and pointed to the chair two chairs over from the one I was sitting in. Curled up on one of the arms was a small timber rattler, who had obviously been sharing the porch with me since I had come out.
Ash Can
We get house centipedes. They’re speedy little shits, and too damned big to squash, so I do catch-and-release out the front or back door. And after reading at the link that they eat other bugs including spiders, I’m glad I don’t dispatch them violently — we also have these obnoxious little yellow spiders that leave bites that are like painful mosquito bites. The spiders generally stay up by the ceiling where I can’t reach them and they can’t bother us, but if they venture downward they get clobbered, if not by me then apparently by the centipedes.
rhwombat
Australian amphibia are occasionally deafening, but it’s usually too dry for surprising domestic encounters. Instead we have Atrax robustus and 3 out of 5 of the world’s most venomous snake species to pop out and surprise us. Fortunately the marsupials are harmless – except for the platypus, which is so shy that envenomation is worth a paper in the toxicology journals, so there’s really nothing to worry about. Except for a few crocs, marine stingers and cassowaries in the Top End, and the odd shark in a few other places. So nothing to worry about at all really….oh, and the Drop Bears. Watch out for the Drop Bears.
eemom
@gravie:
oh God, I HATE those motherfuckers.
Do you know their weird story? Evidently they hitched a ride over here from Japan at some point and the reason they’re so prevalent is they have no natural predators. Or something.
Whatever, I’d give the Japanese back the goddamn cherry blossoms if they’d take those buggers with them.
Kay
Bats. They’re everywhere here, and I’m afraid of them. I once found a bat sleeping on top of the trash in the courthouse bathroom garbage can. I think it was probably exhausted from swooping around in there all night. I’m not looking for them. They find me.
MattF
Do the frogs eat the flying cockroaches, or vice versa? I only ask.
Omnes Omnibus
@rhwombat: I’ll see your drop bears and raise you a hodag.
Suffern ACE
@eemom: Let’s be fair with the blames here. The stink bugs and the biting ladybug swarms come from China. Japan gave us the shiny beetles that eat leaves and bite your arms.
Randy P
I remember when Dave Barry wrote his first columns after relocating to South Florida, it was the flying cockroaches divebombing his barbecues that got to him
wapsie
Palmetto Bugs (=giant southern-US roaches)
especially when, from up near the ceiling, they FLY AT YOUR FACE
(they don’t fly so much as fall without style, with loud low-pitched buzzing and furious flapping)
and you can keep your home squeaky-clean – they’re still going to get in
dr. bloor
Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Ralphie;
@Omnes Omnibus: Hodag? You from Rhinelander?
Omnes Omnibus
@Ralphie;: God, no. My family has a cabin near there.
Clark Stooksbury
I used to have frogs in my apartment when I lived in Port Townsend, Washington. Fortunately, they were small and kept out of the Kitchen.
RSA
We have lots of tree frogs in our back yard. A few years ago I sent a picture of one to Ugly Overload, a alternative to the cute site.
Schlemizel
We had a screened in pool when we lived in Florida yet somehow regularly had snakes in the pool. Many days I would come home from work & the kids would show me the latest acquisition their mom had taken out of the pool. Most of them we turned loose but a couple the kids kept for a few days & tried to make pets out of.
The only thing I didn’t care for (other than the godzilla cockroaches was the spiders, there are some nasty ones there.
Betty Cracker
@wapsie: I hate those fucking Palmetto bugs too. You have to hit them with a tire iron to kill them. Recently one dropped from the ceiling and was flying around my living room. When it landed, I beat it with a broom hard enough to leave dents in my wall, and it would just patiently wait until I quit beating it and fly to another spot. Jesus, I hate those damn things.
geg6
@eemom:
They’re from China actually. And apparently came to the US through Pennsylvania. We’ve had them here for the last few years and were completely overrunning us by last year. For some reason, they are migrating south and we have many fewer this year than in the past. And I can’t tell you how glad that makes me. They ruined most of the fruit from our fruit trees and decimated our tomatoes.
Our new invasion seems to be an owl that has taken up residence in one of the trees in our yard. It’s huge and scared the crap out of me the other day when it took off just over my head while I had the dog out to do his business early in the morning. And I’ve been finding owl pellets on the deck.
schrodinger's cat
Lady bugs, I live in a old house, that seems to be crawling with them, they did not die, even in winter.
Walker
I have red tailed hawks that, for some reason, like to dive bomb contractors working on the house.
bmaccnm
Raccoons. Punk-ass momma raccoons and their punk-ass kids, prowling my back porch in close-in PDX. I’m scared of raccoons, because they’re not scared of me. “Bring it on, bitch.” they say, as they knock over the garbage and the cat food and the compost.
schrodinger's cat
I also have to say, that I am not a big fan of creepy crawlies. This includes roaches, lizards, frogs and such. Even so, Gerald Durrell’s books about them are a great read.
If you haven’t read any, My Family and other Animals is a great place to start.
Wagon
@RandyP
We have them too, we refer to them as cave crickets. They’re big and the pop when you kill them. Harmless, but tough to squish due to them jumping around everywhere.
bemused
@schrodinger’s cat:
They may be a type of Asian beetle, another transplant, that look very much like ladybugs. There was a deluge of them a few years ago here. They seemed to hibernate in the house during the winter, never saw one, and then started showing up as soon as it started warming up outside. They would collect inside the southern and western regions of the house where the sun would come in. It was a daily vacuuming chore. One family living in a very old house had so many beetles, they burned out their vacuum cleaner.
schrodinger's cat
@bemused: I think that’s what they are, here they are known as Japanese ladybugs. They fly too!
chrome agnomen
wingtards. living in wyoming, they’re a common nuisance, usually popping up out of nowhere just as you’ve started an interesting conversation. ruins the whole ambience. wish there was an effective pesticide.
cmorenc
I have possums and raccoons who find the deck on the rear side of our beach house (on a barrier island in North Carolina) to be a safe place to use as their potty whenever no one’s occupying the house. One of the first tasks I have to do upon arrival for a stay down there is to check the status of the back deck for possum/coon poop (evidenced by the numerous berry hulls mixed in with it) and sweep/scrape/wash it off, depending on its age and composition. There are deer on the island who can often be seen wandering along the unpaved street in front of my house at dusk. ALSO TOO my next-door neighbors (who are wonderful folks) are over-the-top cat people (and rescuers of strays) and so at any given time there are one to two dozen cats who are variously their personal pets (about a half-dozen) or strays who get fed there and hang out part-time. Several of these cats like to hang out under the lush vegetation in my yard, so I often accidentally startle a kitty walking around. There’s even a kitty graveyard in their yard immediately across the property line from mine, with probably forty kitty graves marked with tiny marble markers, with the cat’s name.
COCKROACHES! Arrgh! Wood cockroaches are endemic to the island, and I manage to keep ’em outside. The cats next door do have the beneficial effect of helping keep their numbers in check.
gogol's wife
Why am I reading this thread first thing in the morning?
Constance
Dave Barry’s first book of fiction recounts (among many hilarious adventures of people and dogs) the war between a dog and a large poisonous Floridian frog for the dog’s food. The frog always wins. I remember laughing till I cried all the way through that book.
We have black widows and scorpions to surprise us while working in the garden, occasionally in the house. No frogs, sadly.
Schlemizel
@Betty Cracker:
Ah yes, the godzilla of cockroaches, the Palmetto bug. They also tend to be kamikazes – when they see you they fly right at you. Sort of unnerving when you are not expecting it.
I work in a building that has boxelder bugs. The are harmless, stinkless little black and orange things. They fly & some of my coworkers are positively creeped out by them. I just ignore them but the guy in the next cube about wets himself trying to get out of their way/kill them. THATS entertainment!
Schlemizel
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah and those damn thing bite! Unlike the passive ladybug whom they have disguised themselves as.
Have you ever seen the larval stage of ladybugs? I was in the garden one spring & noticed some black and orange “alligator” bugs. they looked almost like tiny gators with orange spots. I wondered what they were until I noticed a bunch of ladybugs hanging around a few weeks later. pretty cool looking.
Nicole
Slightly larger critter, but I have to brag on my two friends- they rescued three of the Thoroughbreds being neglected by Ernie Paragallo (it was in the news about three years ago), and were able to rehabilitate one of them enough to get to the racetrack. Really sweet piece in the NYT about her:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/sports/filly-makes-ride-from-neglect-to-the-racetrack.html?_r=1&ref=sports
I’ll be at Aqueduct on Sunday to cheer her on.
Svensker
Raccoons. Big buggers in the city here and they’re protected so they’re completely unafraid of humans. Big guy sitting on our deck chair and VERY annoyed that we wanted to sit on it. When we yelled at him he hopped down and sort of glared at us, then mosied over a few feet and just stayed there for about 10 minutes staring at us.
Elizabelle
Slightly OT, but maybe not:
Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas Collins on “Dark Shadows” gothic soap opera, has died.
On Friday, April 13.
A month before the Johnny Depp remake comes out. Frid had a cameo.
debbie
I use hornet and wasp spray (the kind that can shoot 20 feet) to knock down the cave crickets in my basement. I couldn’t catch them if I tried. My nephew, who lives in the basement of his family’s home, can kill them with a flick of a towel.
bemused
@schrodinger’s cat:
Try to avoid letting one fly into your mouth. Horrible, just horrible, trust me.
burnspbesq
As it turns to summer here in OC and it gets drier in the canyons, coyotes increasingly come into residential areas in search of water. Which is bad news for the local kittehs.
We also have a dumbfuck Republican Congressman who has a nasty habit of popping up at street fairs and charity events.
burnspbesq
The bee guy is coming tomorrow to bring back the colony that he extracted from an old irrigation control box in our front hedge, in a commercial box hive that will go in the back yard. Just in time to pollinate our tomatoes. Get to work, ya little fookers!
mcmullje
So glad to hear that you have set boundaries because that is what I have done with all critters. I leave them strictly alone when they are outside – even the wasps that have a nest under the eaves of my house every summer. However, if they come into my house then sorry – spiders especially – fair game. I tried once to pick up a living spider in a kleenex to carry outside, but it got loose, crawled up my arm and into my hair and I freaked.
Joey Maloney
Hawaii has coqui frogs. They’re an invasive species, tiny little fuckers that live in flower blossoms, but they are loud. I’ve been able to track their spread year by year by driving up Kilanea Avenue and then Volcano Highway and noting the point where their insane chirping falls off. Ten years ago they were still confined within the Hilo city limits; now you can hear them until you’re approaching 2000 ft. elevation.
The full-grown ones are about the size of a quarter. I have a picture somewhere of a blob of little-fingernail-sized babies hatching out of an egg sac on an unused BBQ grill.
andy
Up here we have bunnies. Sure, even in town you may see the odd bear or deer- eagles are pretty common overhead (the thermals must be really something what with all the parking lots and flat roofs), and being on the Mississippi and near a ton of lakes, all kinds of waterbirds are in the area, but the wild critter I see the most is the bunny. I’m not sure why, but in the last five years they’ve just become really visible. They don’t even seem that scared of humans- in broad daylight they’re out nibbling on the lawn.
Rosalita
Gah! I grew up in CT and live here now. But, we moved to Florida for a time. God DAM I hated the palmetto bugs. Disgusting, creepy and they’d all scurry when you turned on the kitchen light and you could hear them. Every bug known to man down there, and I think the mosquitos should have tail numbers.
cope
I, too, live in Florida, just north of Orlando. We also have those invasive Cuban tree frogs. They like to get up inside our big umbrellas around the pool and sometimes, cranking one of them open results in an unpleasant face-to-face encounter.
We also get bears in our neighborhood, even though it is a 1970s suburban-type place. We don’t keep trash outside any more (one once dragged a full trash bag up on the front porch to dine) and lost more than one bird feeder to bears.
I’ll skip the various invertebrates but will mention the banded king snake that swam up to me in our pool one night and the other that had found a comfortable spot draped over a bike tire, under the rear fender. That one made a tangled escape as I was pushing the bike down the driveway.
Lizards (brown anoles, also invasive) in the house are another persistent presence.
I’ve gotten pretty much used to most of these critters and am willing to peaceably coexist as long as they don’t surprise me.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
Our main problem in our current house has always been these horrible little larder beetles. They go after the cat food (but are fortunately easy to control with a monthly application of this stuff).
Carpenter Bees have taken up in my shed.
And I’ve been seeing those same weird brown/tan ladybugs in my neck of the woods, also.
I really do despise insects.
serge
We get the occasional, small lizard in the family home. They’re more funny than anything else, and easy to remove. The critters that I find frustrating are these tiny tree frogs that get in and proceed to make the loudest noise you can imagine. Plus, they’re hard to locate…this is on Sullivan’s Island on the SC coast.
muddy
Skunks come in the fenced yard. The dog I have now thinks they are kitties (bon soir, pepe!), a previous dog ripped the tail off one while getting sprayed. When I looked in the yard the next day I saw the tail lying there looking like Andy Warhol’s toupee.
For frogs, last year I gave my above ground pool away, and when the guy and his kids came to dismantle it, there were 2 frogs inside one of the vertical supports near the top. The 10 year old wanted to know why the one was sitting on top of the other, his teen sibs were snickering.
My dog caught a toad amongst the asparagus, I saw him hunting it, and then later I saw him with what looked to be a full mouth face. I had him give it up and it looked like a rock (it was covered in mud), but altho it didn’t move the thing just felt alive to me. I rinsed it off, and then let it go. I was amazed to see it hop off unharmed. Also amazed that it didn’t slime him, I guess there was too much mud on it.
I like bats, and hung some old shutters on the back side of the house at the 2nd floor, they like to hang there.
Mnemosyne
One of the nice things about So Cal is that we don’t have too many bugs, though we are convinced that our apartment building is actually a giant anthill that the ants have decided to permit us to live in.
Our pests tend to be much larger, furrier, and have very sharp teeth.
Origuy
Bald eagles have returned to Crystal Springs Reservoir near I-280 between San Francisco and San Jose after nearly 100 years. There’s a nesting pair in the Water District land, which is off limits to the public. There are also three pairs in Santa Clara county.
Mnemosyne
Also, the coyote influx after the Station Fire seems to have tapered off a bit. For a while there, they were just wandering down the street like they owned the place. Yet another reason our kitties are indoor-only.
DFH no.6
North Scottsdale, rattlesnakes.
The ubiquitous coyotes and lizards, and occasional javelinas, bobcats, and great horned owls, etc., are all pretty cool, actually, when they pop up, and even the scorpions and other arachnids (when outdoors, of course) are ok.
But even though I’ve lived in Sheriff Joe Arpaio County for over thirty years now, I grew up in an inner city neighborhood of Cleveland, so I will never, ever get used to rattlesnakes.
Deb T
@andy:
Not enough cats. They can really impact the bunny population
I have possums. An adolescent one came into my house and when it saw me it jumped into my toaster oven.
pat
I walked into the furnace room the other day to glimpse a large brown leg disappearing down the drain. The next day the huge spider (probably 2 inches toe-to-toe) scuttled around when I turned on the light, and finally ran under the furnace. He’s still there. Too big to squash, ick.
The Japanese lady beetles were imported to eat aphids or something off the soybeans, I believe. Our previous home was in farm country and it was impossible to keep them out of the house.
Bunnies. I trapped about a dozen the first winter we were in our new house, because all the landscaping plants were young and succulent and irresistable. I let them go in a wooded area far from houses.
One day I went out to check the live trap, and it was gone! Finally found it under the porch, where a frustrated coyote had dragged it. Slightly traumatized and bleeding bunny still in it.
cckids
Scorpions. The pale bark ones that blend into our wood floors. I’ve discovered that if more than one cat is sitting, staring intensely at what seems to be nothing, they have discovered a scorpion. Creepy little bastards. (not the cats)
pacem appellant
I like insects, especially bees, but I can’t abide the cockroach. They are endemic to our neighborhood, and every night since after the last torrent of rain when the days got warmer, large reddish-black insects have been crawling all over our floors. Because of the children, I can’t put bait out (and it wouldn’t be nice to the birds, either), so glue traps it is. In the past two nights alone, we’ve caught twenty big ones. That’s bad news. I’ve found that the smaller the ones I catch, the lighter the infestation, big ones mean that there’s a legion tiny ones waiting in the wings. I ordered two-hundred glue traps and I’m going to carpet my floors with them. Glue traps are great once you get over the visceral cringe of the popping sound that the roaches make when you squish them between two pieces of cardboard, but if you forget about them in the middle of the night, be prepared to be extra creeped out after you drink a glass of water and find a glue board and several roaches stuck to your feet.
Bago
@bemused: Pfft. Try getting an insect trapped in the earwax surrounding your eardrum. There’s nothing like the sound of insect wings trapped against your eardrum. Btw, if this ever happens to you the solution is to take some oil and drown the bugger.
The more you Know.
Bago
Oh yeah, before I was distracted by insect talk, I was going to say that the Froggy Bottom is an underground dive bar next to Georgetown University in DC. The gin was amazing.
Laura Clawson
Laughed my ass off at your past tales of frog encounter. Thanks for that.
Linkmeister
@Joey Maloney: Ah yes. Unlike our geckos, the coquis are a noisy nuisance.
We once had a large cane toad somehow get inside the house. I have vivid memories of poking at it with a broom as it cowered under the couch. Eventually it hopped back out, but it was a surreal experience.
wobbly
Thank God you got them! Amphibian species are dying off at at an alarming rate world wide, and if one individual figured out how to get into your house and your exercise bike, he or she should be treated with the deepest respect.
Jesus Christ! Can’t human beings share this planet with ANYONE???? Even each other?
Tehanu
I’m in LA and for the first time in my life here we have giant roaches — I’m talking 2-1/2 or 3 inches long. We put out roach motels which kill the ones that come inside — so then we find dead or dying ones in the tub or kitchen, just as disgusting as when they’re running around, really — because the landlord won’t spring for an exterminator and we can’t afford it ourselves. We also have ants, but that is extremely common in Southern California, whether you’re in Beverly Hills or Watts.
The other night I was out looking at the sunset and suddenly realized that the “squirrel” walking along the telephone line over the walkway was a rat. Ugh. On the bright side, we have bluejays, flocks of feral parakeets, and last year a great blue heron landed on the roof across the street and hung around for a good hour.
Steverino
Here in SE Connecticut I have coyotes in the woods behind the house, and so a lack of felines to keep the squirrels, chipmunks, and mice away from my bird feeder. The d*mned chipmunks are too light to trigger the lever that keeps the squirrels out, and just sit there stuffing their cute little furry cheeks. I had to brake hard to avoid a turkey running across a busy road this morning. It dodged several cars; even when they fly they are so low you have to avoid them.
In the house we have an annual influx of ants: it’s about time to put down the pesticide barrier outside. And I had an intrepid spider rappel down to my desk right beside me the other night; while I was grabbing a tissue it made a clean getaway. The odd centipede shows up, too.
Fort Geek
All last summer I had a little green tree frog living in my window air conditioner.
The little shit always seemed to know when I was trying to sleep, no matter what time of day or night…then GRAK! GRAK! GRAK!
Found a link to something close to his call. Crank it up for best effect!