What Should I Do With The Wild Frog Living In Our Small Decorative Pond? We Live In SE Michigan And It Is Getting Colder, And Our Pond Is About 1 Ft Deep And Has A Plastic Bottom.
Want to know if we should a) leave him outside in our plastic pond; 2) create an indoor terrarium for him or 3) release him into natural pond. He is about 6" long.
I live in Ohio, not quite as cold as Michigan, but I have a pond about 18 inches deep and the frogs seem to winter OK.Spring and I have a good crop of tadpoles and the larger frogs are still there. Throughout the winter I keep a hole in the ice. There is an frog FAQ @:
Http://www.learner.org/jnorth/search/FrogNotes3.html
jnawrocki--thanks for sharing your experience. We'll leave him be and hope he figures out what to do. (With global warming it shouldn't this year be as cold anyway)
If any experts out there think this is wrong please correct me, but I've since learned that pond frogs (not sure exactly what species I have in my tiny pond) typically stay in the water thru the winter and actually can come close to a frozen state, then "thaw out" in spring. What little oxygen they need they absorb thru their skin. They do NOT burrow into the mud at the bottom as turtles do--if they did they would suffocate. Therefore it probably makes sense to leave him in the pond and hope he makes it thru winter, and finds a mate in spring!
Most of the times the frogs will go into hibernation and you won't even see them anyways until spring. I think that they will winter ok and you will be seeing more of them real soon.