Quirky critters

It has been a week full of stories I could tell about animals. Two in particular.
First of all, there is Geo-Dog...not er real name, but that is the title she has earned because she comes along as we geocache, sometimes. She is a smart critter. We went geocaching this past week, along a walking trail in the middle of nowhere, pretty much. Searching for one particular cache, we went tromping through long grass and short shrubs, scratching up our legs pretty well. Son was not a happy camper when we got ground zero, and we never did find this cache. We were dreading the traipse back, and as we started out, I noticed that Geo-Dog seemed to know where she was going. I figured things couldn't get much worse, so I let her have her head and followed along at the end of her leash. Wouldn't you know my silly, soppy, half-crazed Black lab/shepherd/greyhound cross picked up the scent of other cachers? She led us along a nearly invisible trail....MUCH easier on the legs than our entry trail...and got us back to the path, goiung in a different direction from where we had come from? Pretty impressive. Now if only she could have left the ticks behind. We are STILL finding them!
The second story is about a little frog named Hopper. We had a lot of puddles in the ditches near our house, and could hear the frogs SCREAMING out their ribbits....so I thought it might be kind of cool to go frog hunting with Son and Daughter. So we went, annd we looked, and listened, and looked....and couldn't find anything because we were looking for frogs to match the loudness of the ribbits. I will never know how a sound that loud could come from a frog that small, but we finally found one, about an inch long. The kids were thrilled and set him up in a huge jar with a rock and water and such....and declared we would keep it forever. How to feed a frog? So I was out in the backyard daily, after some internet research, catching ants and beetles and anything I could find that moved. No luck. Hopper would not eat. One day, just out of desperation, I caught a housefly and got it into the jar. The fly was about 3/4 the size of the frog. Well....Hopper ate the fly....and died. My suspicion, based on the size of the fly was that Hopper either choked to death, or his tummy exploded.
I now have a tiny grave in my flower bed, with a rock saying "Hopper" on it, loving;y dug and created by my children. Silly frog.