Froggies with a Death Wish and other Pool Worries

SAVE THE FROGGIES! Please help!

I have a beautifully resurfaced, sparking-blue-water pool that is very alluring to the eye.

That’s not just my eye— it appears to be alluring to various animals in the backyard and it is causing some heartache and trouble.

Aside from the copper water beetles that find their way into my pool, only to get sucked in by the jets to the return baskets, along with an assortment of bees, wasps, dragonflies, and the like; this year is the year of suicidal frogs for my pool.

I will not, and I repeat will not, open the return baskets on either side of my pool at all, because inside of them each week, my husband finds a few dead frogs. It is a pathetic, sad sight of their bloated bodies and bulging eyes according to him.

I don’t know why they won’t stay away from the pool. The current takes them right to the return baskets where they get trapped and die by chlorine or whatever in there makes them die.

I feel like putting a sign on the pool: Warning Froggies. The water looks tempting, but is a death-trap. Do Not Enter Under Any Circumstances. This is NOT your friendly pond.

It’s less relaxing for me to swim knowing what lies dead on either side of my pool returns. It creeps me out to be honest. I swim daily, and last weekend tangled with one of the stupid little frogs that I scrambled around the pool to get out before it got sucked into the return. (Besides I did not care to swim alongside it.)

It was quite a scene, that rescue of mine, because I did not have my husband’s tool of choice –  the net with a super long telescopic handle. At any rate, that one was eventually saved, but it ruined my day’s swim, and of course it could be the same one of the unlucky ones eventually found in the basket dead.

My husband has been quite heroic dealing with the grisly and horrific scene every time he cleans the return baskets. I would become ill to see that sight. I have a son who is a Vet and a daughter-in-law Vet tech, and I do not know how they do what they do. I am a weakling when it comes to helpless animals. I cannot stand to see any suffering or death with them.

When I was 16 and discovered roadkill, I wrote a poem that my English teacher liked. It went something like:

I can’t look down at the roads as our car whizzes along the highway

A bump on the road causes me great fear

Too many times, an animal is left there dead and mangled

And if I would see that, I would die inside too.

(There was a little more to it, but that was the gist, and I know I was a little melodramatic, but I have always been terrified of seeing dead or harmed animals.) Although in all disclosure I was also singing “Dead Skunk in the middle of the Road” gleefully at the top of my lungs with my boyfriend at the time, Danny, just a year or so later because we thought it was such a funny song.

Getting back to my suicidal frogs, does anyone else have this problem, or is it just me, Snow White, that attracts animals to swim with me in my pool. (My last blog on that critter subject is linked there.)

Any suggestions out there? Save The Frogs! Help!