A Frogging We Will Go

Right after I returned from Malheur, Margaret called Leslie and told her that Kylan had just checked a birding book out of his school library and was enthused to “go birding.” Needless to say, Leslie couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take the kid(s) birding the next weekend, and, after I pointed out that birding around here is extremely slow, we decided to go to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.

Both kids were ready for anything, with binoculars for birding

Mira with binoculars

and jars to collect insect specimens

.

As it turned out, the first interesting thing we saw was this small, orangish frog.

Orange frog

After that sighting, I told them, as grandpas are prone to do, how I’d seen small tree frogs on the cattails in the past.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Kylan and Mira found small tree frogs sitting on leaves.

small tree frog

not just once but several times.

After I’d pointed out a bullfrog sitting low in the water, with just its eyes or head out of the water,

Frog with head out of water

Mira spotted one sitting on top of a log nearby:

Bullfrog on log

As you might have guessed from the (lack of) pictures, we didn’t see many birds except for Mallards and a few Great Blue Herons in the distance.

The kids seemed just as happy when I spotted this painted turtle way out in the pond,

Painted Turtle

well, that and the cricket that Grandma had helped Kylan catch.

One of the reasons Leslie chose to take them to Nisqually was so she could buy Kylan his own birding book. When we got to the store, though, he and Mira decided that they would rather have little stuffed birds than a birding book. Birds or no birds, Kylan pronounced the day “the bestest ever.”