Froggy A Cappella

Our townhouse overlooks a retention swamp. My guess is it was originally meant to be a retention pond, but at some point the developer and/or HOA gave up on its being full of water. They have tried to make it look like it has a purpose by landscaping it  and putting a picnic table down in the middle of it, but the only use I have ever seen made of the picnic table is as a place for the neighborhood kids to put their jars full of tadpoles that they have fished out of the swampy water that surrounds it.* If I were a kid, I would be right down there with them. As an adult I wish it were a full pond maybe with a nice fountain in the middle.

The retention swamp in the day

It would be reasonable to assume that with a swamp a mere forty feet from my back door we would have a terrible mosquito problem, but due to the parents of the afore mentioned tadpoles, we are fairly free of those flying, buzzing, blood-sucking fiends. It really is amazing the frogs even have time to clear the skies of mosquitoes what with their constant ongoing choir practice.

In Georgia the sound of summer evenings is cicadas. Apparently in North Carolina, at least in my little corner of Cary, it is frogs. I have never heard such a cacophony. We can hear it in the house with the insulated windows closed. We can hear it over the TV. We can hear it from our third floor bedroom. It is especially loud when the bullfrogs join in with their baritone ribbits.

The retention swamp at night

There is no swamp behind the new house. There is thick tree barrier that I think will be nice to look at, but I doubt we will have our own froggy a cappella group serenading us on summer nights. I will definitely miss that.

*Don't worry, the tadpole catching is a catch and release program only.