Midnight Mayhem

The Monsoon Frog [ http://monsoon-frog.blogspot.com ] has been seriously compromised! The first cane toad has been officially identified on the premises. Individual ones have been seen in the area, and dealt with in the appropriate way. * How did the MF react? Pretty much according to programming, attack is the best defence; grabbed a heavy blunt object and furiously attacked the hapless beast, beat it to a pulp and then deposited it in the mulch bin. You would think that it would probably contaminate the whole mix, but no, according to the experts, it makes quite good fertilizer.

Seeing that it was the middle of the night (back to that in a minute) the neighbours were scared out of their wits; heavy spade on concrete driveway makes a fairly loud noise on a still tropical night. Was there a mass murderer in our quiet leafy suburb? Had Trevor, the night rubbish warrior broken ranks and moved from the minor arterial roads into the suburbs to make his little rubbish piles?

What was happening?

Back to the hour of the adventure.

A fairly loud crashing noise had been heard, appearing to come from our downstairs area and the MF had been despatched to identify and hopefully, solve the problem. Found that the mighty ridgeback, the home protector, had jumped up with front paws high up on the gate to the backyard, and in an attempt to see what was entering the premises had knocked over a set of shelves. The MF followed the dog’s direction of interest; and the ugly beast was seen trying to exit the premises via the front driveway.

Most other MFs were considering a type of tropical hibernation at this time of the year; Thursday was the first day of the dry season, but this one has admirably carried out his civic duty and could slip into a blissful sleep with a clear conscience, for now.

* current official advice for humanely dealing with a cane toad is to capture it, place it in a plastic bag, or two and place it in the freezer with the other wildlife – fish, chicken, beef etc – and when the garbage collection day arrives, place it in the bin. Quite sensible advice really, as long as one can have the idea of combining wildlife together like that. However, at 1am with a feral frog disappearing at speed (the critters can actually move along quite swiftly when pursued) more urgent actions need to be adopted.