Toady Frog

I have become very fond of these little frogs. I wasn't sure if they were frogs or toads when we first started finding them under the cushion on our swing out on the front porch. I don't know why we looked under the cushion to start with - maybe it was to get the leaves and spiders out from under it that always seemed to accumulate there. But we found a small frog there a few months ago. So now we always check to see if there is a frog or not. I don't remember ever finding one there last summer. And I am sure I cleaned out the leaves a few times. But we kept finding a frog under the cushion. Now why would a little frog want to hide there? At first I worried that it didn't have enough since to leave and find water and food because we always seemed to find it there. And it looked to be the same frog. And how did it get from the floor of the porch into the swing. The swing is about two feet off the floor and hung by chains from the celling. I know these little tree frogs have long toes with pads that act like succion cups and let them climb almost anything but there was nothing to climb to get to the swing. They had to jump. That is a long jump for a little two inch frog. So when we wanted to sit on our swing we removed the little frog and put it in the bushes that grow around the porch. Next time we would check froggie would be back under the cushion. Hummmm. I started checking more frequently. I descovered the froggie was usually there during daylight hours but gone after dark. I was glad it had enough since to leave and go insect hunting when it got hungrey. I looked up frogs and toads native to Kentucy  and found this is the Copes Tree Frog. They can come in all shades of very light grey to a shade of green like the one that had decided our swing made a good home for it. I had seen some of the actually grey frogs in the summers before since we lived here but they kept to the flowers that I had growing in pots on the porch. In fact the first one I ever saw looked so much like a clump of mud on the porch I almost swept it off until it moved and hopped away. It was one of the grey ones with dark grey splotches on it. I even tried putting out the trail camera to try and get a video of it getting into the swing or even leaving it. But I didn't get any thing of a frog on the camera. Just the chipmunks and squirrels that visited our porch looking for some of the seeds we put out for the birds. Then we didn't see anything of our new pet for about a week. Had something happened to it? We would never know. But yesterday I checked under the cushion before sitting down and found another frog there. I knew this one was different because it was about half the size of the other one. Maybe a hair over an inch long or so. So small I almost missed seeing it. Well now I know that more than one of the little frogs find that a cushion on a swing is a nice place to hide out during the day.

In this photo you can see how small the frog is when I put a pencil next to it. This is the larger of the two frogs that we have seen.

What the swing looks like. Is there a frog under the cushion? You have to raise it up to see. 

How the swing looks with someone sitting in it. This is hubby and our dog.