A frog among herons

I stepped out last night and found a frog perched on the back windshield of my car -- a rather handsome medium-sized brown frog with dark eyes. I'm not really up on the frog species on Taiwan yet, but if I had seen it in America I would have called it a Little Grass Frog, and I assume it was something along those lines -- a "tree frog" but of a non-arboreal species.

I always feel responsible for animals that show up at my doorstep, and clearly this frog had to be moved. He had unwittingly wandered into the territory of a half-dozen feral cats that pretty much kill anything that moves (they just got a skink the other day), and one of them particularly likes to sleep on that car.

I first tried to move it by hand, with the predictable result. (As Hobbes observed, "They drink water all day just in case someone picks them up.") This spooked the frog enough that it hopped away and climbed up into the innards of the neighbor's motorcycle to hide. I spent some time with a flashlight trying to locate and extract the creature, but it had hidden too well. In the end, I had to give up and just hope that it had the good sense to come out before morning.

An hour or so later, I stepped out again, and the frog was back on the car! This time I managed to persuade it to hop into a little paper bowl, and I set off to find a safe place to let it go. The frog settled in, folding its limbs up as neatly as a bat's, and waited patiently in the bottom of the bowl, turning its head occasionally to check on me but otherwise motionless. (In fact, his movements and general mien reminded me very much of one particular bat I had known years ago, so much so that thoughts of reincarnation fluttered around the periphery of my attention. With short-lived species, who can say how many times, and in how many guises, the same handful of beast-souls might keep crossing one's path?)

My wife had suggested that I let him go on the big magnolia by the side of the road, but in the end I decided that the dangers of the road, and the lack of water and of other vegetation, outweighed the commonsense consideration that a tree frog ought to be in a tree. (Anyway, my somewhat biologically informed hunch was that this, while technically a tree frog in the same way that a panda is technically a carnivore, was a mostly non-arboreal creature I was dealing with.) I opted instead for a paddy field with a few small trees in it, some distance from the road.

When I reached the intended release point, I was greeted by the sound of heavy wingbeats, and a large heron rose up from a nearby canal and flapped off into the night. Herons, of course, eat frogs, and I almost decided to take my little charge elsewhere. However, I already knew from experience that there were no unheroned precincts in the vicinity, and in fact for the moment this was the one stretch of paddy where I knew for sure there was not a heron hunting -- so I said a brief prayer for him and let him go, comforting myself with the thought that, whatever the risks, he was at least safer now than he would have been if I had left him in the lions' den where I had found him. "Go your way: behold, I send you forth as a frog among herons." In the end, I'm afraid, safety just isn't on the menu for frogs. They must seek other satisfactions. He made a few trial hops, turned back to look at me for a second, and then disappeared into the vegetation.

*

The strange thing is that I'm usually on quite friendly terms with the local herons and have no objections to their catching and eating frogs -- but I wanted very much for them not to eat this particular one. But why? Why should this frog live and others die? Just because it's the one I happened to find -- or rather, the one that happened to find me? Well, yes, that's the reason -- and on some level I feel quite sure that such thinking isn't as irrational as it seems.