re: #404 Killgore Trout

House frogs!

Ribbit.

My ghetto apartment (obviously designed and constructed by freshly out-of-work Soviet housing bureaucrats shortly after the fall of Communism, using surplus Soviet materials) sits next to a creek (of sorts) that eventually empties into the Trinity river.

In years past, the creek has been home to several families of ducks, the occasional otter* and what must be thousands of invisible frogs. Except in the winter, you could go outside at night and hear what sounded like an enormous herd of frogs trolling for frog babes. I imagine them with little faux-hawk hairdos, reeking of Sex Panther cologne, and generally emulating the frogs of Jersey Shore.

The strange thing is that I only rarely saw any frogs. One time, I was walking my dog on a sort of rainy/misty evening just at dusk. It was at that TWILIGHT ZONE time of day at the tail-end of sunset just before dark, when human eyesight starts to fail and the world becomes black shapes on a dark blue canvass. Walking along, I noticed a small black shape flitting across the sidewalk. I assumed it was a cricket. When I got close enough, I realized it was a tiny little frog. Pretty neat! It was small enough that it could have lounged comfortably in a bottle cap.

This year, the ducks are still there, but the frog karaoke bar seems to have closed. Are you sufficiently familiar with froglore that you might have an explanation for where all the frogs have gone?

* I nearly came unglued the first time I saw an otter. I had no idea otters could be found in Texas, particularly urban North Texas. I saw one lazily swim up the creek, make landfall about 30 feet away from me, and look at me like, “eh, what’s up, Doc?” I tried to get a little closer and it jumped back in the water and took off.

tl;dr - used to have frogs, don’t have frogs now.