Miniature frog


In my rainforest nursery shadehouse the sprinklers come on automatically, keeping it cool and wet and green. Naturally frogs love it.

Snakes like frogs, so as the snake season heats up, I was tidying up in there.

Snake-covering grass and weeds had grown up in between the foam boxes filled with recycled milk carton ‘pots’, uniting the varied seedling trees with a green drapery.

Having been rather neglected this past year, some seedlings had grown right through the bases of the boxes and had to be dug out and planted down in the regenerating gullies at once. Others had to be repotted into fresh milk cartons.

Sorting through one matted box, I spotted this tiny inhabitant. Its colour fitted right in for camouflage, but not its texture: a glistening greenish-brown, mottled in some lights, with distinctly bright green sides and cream cheek stripes.

It wasn’t disposed to move, even as my sorting brought me closer, so I gently tipped its home seedling towards a box that I wouldn’t be touching for a day or so.

I think it could be a Blue Mountains Tree Frog, which has been found here (even though it’s not the Blue Mountains).

There is something very appealing about miniature creatures like this, so perfect in itself, and in its own little world.