A few weeks ago, my evening visits to the chicken coop were accompanied by the honking of dozens of Canada geese.  They were feeding along the shore in the meadow across from the Red Cottage – the area called “the little meadow” by our family.  It was where my grandfather raised hay for his cows, not to be confused with “the big meadow” farther south where his dairy herd often grazed during the summer months.

About dusk each evening, as I went out to collect the day’s eggs and lock the chickens away from marauding raccoons and other nighttime predators, the geese cacophony would ramp up.  Soon, two-by-two, they would fly over our place – low and toward the northwest.  They seemed to skim over my head and I sometimes worried that I’d get dumped on.  But I didn’t; they were always polite.

The last two to fly over were always accompanied by a loner.  I’m not enough of a birder to know if it was a male or female but I do know that geese mate for life and each evening I would wonder about that singleton and what had happened to his/her mate.

For the last few nights the honking has been replaced by an equally loud chorus of frogs.  The geese gaggle has apparently moved on to another, more promising feeding area and, in a true nature-abhors-a-vacuum kind of way, the air is filled with the sound of frogs.  They seem to be everywhere, loudly proclaiming that it is spring and they are in a family planning mode.  Frogs, of course, are not monogamous.  Anything but.  And when they are on the lookout for a mate, they let everyone know about it.

Last night, one little froggy fellow must have become confused.  He (or she?), being a tree frog and well able to defy gravity, attached himself to one of the windowpanes in our east door.  Perhaps he was just taking a little snooze.  He was there for several hours and I wished him well as I tottered off to bed.  He was gone this morning – I hope of his own volition.  I’m not sure how many of the frog-eating night-critters would brave our rickety porch to scoop a morsel off the window.  But you never know.