If you’re one of the many Americans who hire ChemLawn or some similar company to spray their lawns to make sure that the grass looks lush, thick and uniform, you might want to think about the little things I found in my own lawn yesterday.
I had let the grass grow up to about 5 inches before I mowed it yesterday. As I pushed along, I noticed that, along with the crickets and grasshoppers leaping out of the way, there were also toads, peepers, and some extremely tiny little frogs (I don’t really know for sure that these smallest ones were actually tiny frogs. I suppose they could have been young toads or peepers – ask your friendly neighborhood herpetologist.)
Looking out upon my back yard from my kitchen window, you would never imagine that there were dozens, maybe hundreds of little vertebrates finding their livelihood amidst the grass, and the other sorts of plants that make up my lawn. I don’t see them except when I provoke the small animals into flight. Yet, I get a great deal of satisfaction knowing that they’re there.
Spray your lawn with pesticides and herbicides, and your lawn will be pure, thick grass, and deadly poison to amphibians, who absorb chemicals easily through their skins. Your lawn will also be a monoculture with poor soil, and therefore more like a desert than a useful little ecosystem.
Let the bugs and sligs, worms and other critters crawl through your grass, and you could get dozens, maybe hundreds, of little amphibians living in your lawn.
It’s always fascinating to me to look at a small vertebrate – something that shares our basic body plan but operates on a profoundly different scale. How different?
Here’s a tiny video of one of those tiny frogs, placed next to my wife as she works on her laptop, so that you can get an idea of its size in context.
I LOVED IT! lol