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"I need tadpoles. Can you get some for me?" asked our daughter Shark. She teaches second grade and wanted them for a classroom aquarium.
"Tadpoles? No, silly. It's the wrong season for tadpoles," I replied. She trusts that I know everything about nature and could fulfill such a request.
A few days later I called her.
"I have a tadpole for you. One."
Little did I know that in a few days I would have a hundred to give her. Okay, maybe 50. Inch-long bullfrog tadpoles swimming in a bucket are hard to count.
And it turns out I didn't know squat about bullfrog tadpoles.
Finding so many tadpoles was a result of five specific, random, unanticipated events. I will list them in chronological order.
THURSDAY, FEB. 12: After a run of 10 consecutive days (Feb 1-10) of daily high temperatures remaining below freezing, thick ice on our farm pond sagged and broke open a deep drainpipe, evacuating the water and leaving a shallow residual pool and slimy, foot-thick muck.
SUNDAY, JUNE 2: I and our three younger grandsons, The Favorite, Lamppost Head and The 747, waded into the muck of the pool and by dint of great exertion hand-caught three large and valuable algae-eating koi fish, and, with assistance from my sister Col. Peggy, successfully transported them to a new home in Mike Ludovici's lower pond. The next day all remaining fish in the pool, mainly brim and bass, were dead and floating, their gills apparently suffocated by the muck we churned up. Daily fishing visits by a great blue heron ceased. During the melee we had caught and thrown out on the bank to die a dozen huge carp and a two or three big catfish, undesirables apparently introduced by natural means.
THURSDAY, OCT. 29: In late afternoon, near the end of unseasonably warm weather and 14 consecutive days with no measurable rainfall, at the height of wildfire risk, our neighbor Alan Boyd called me to report a small wildfire burning unchecked on our shared property line. Earlier in the day I had been cutting up a large, dead white oak there and I am certain it resulted from embers in wood dust ignited by the hot exhaust of my chainsaw. I trucked buckets of water from the pool below the farm pond, called grandsons Rufus and Bob for help, and with considerable effort we put out the fire. Alan called again at 1 a.m. to say the fire had rekindled and was burning his shed. Honestly, it wasn't much of a shed anyway. He and I doused the fire for good. The next day I found a single tadpole in a water bucket.
MONDAY, NOV. 2: Excavator Brad Hall of Hookstown guided his big power shovel to expertly breach the pond dam and dig a deep trench for a new main drainpipe. Mucky water began to flow, draining the residual pool.
TUESDAY, NOV. 3: Free from school because of election day, The Favorite, Lamppost Head and The 747 arrived for a work day to clear pumpkin fields adjacent to the pond. The boys of course had to visit the excavation, climbing the huge piles of dirt and examining murky water flowing in the trench, in which they discovered uncounted numbers of tadpoles. We spent the better part of our work day catching them.
I, along with every person who heard my story, concluded quickly, and wrongly, that this fall's extended warm weather tricked the bullfrogs into mating out of season. When I researched bullfrog life cycles using Google AI, I learned it takes bullfrog tadpoles three months to reach the size of ours, so likely they hatched out back in June after we had killed off all the fish.
That pool was a tadpole kingdom.
Also, I learned, bullfrog tadpoles seldom mature in one season like other frogs do, and may overwinter twice or more as tadpoles before turning into froglets, depending on food, climate and temperature factors. When they overwinter, they do not burrow into muck, because they absorb oxygen through their skins and internal gills, and muck is oxygen-depleted. They sit on top of the muck in a state of dormancy.
My daughter Shark couldn't believe it when I told her it could take two or three years for her large fleet of tadpoles to become frogs.
"I can't keep them that long!" she said.
"You have to keep them at least until we get water back in the pond," I said.
After all, she did ask for them.