Tree Frogs

The common tree frog of Europe, North Africa, and Asia, Hyla arborea, is a graceful little amphibian with a remarkable ability to keep its balance on all kinds of surfaces— trees, trunks, leaves, even the smallest of twigs. Because of its musical call and its appetite for insects, it is welcome in gardens.
Day and night the tree frog follows the comings and goings of insects, small molluscs, and other tiny animals that it eats. The tree frog can stay on smooth slippery surfaces, thanks to certain expanded porlions of its toes, like adhesive discs, as powerful as if they were suction cups. In the summertime it will rest on a leaf during the hottest hours of the day, hardly bending it. Green against the green leaf, it stays absolutely motionless. As soon as it gets cooler, the agile and vigilant male tree frogs inflate the huge sacs they have in their throats and begin the concerts familiar to everyone who lives in the country. It is astonishing that so much noise can come from such tiny animals, rarely as big as two inches long. Only the males are noise-makers; the females are silent.

When in the course of the year, the season for reproduction arrives, the tree frogs temporarily leave the branches and leaves of the trees. The females need water in which to lay their eggs; a pond, a brook, or a pool in a garden is sufficient. There the thousand eggs that each female can lay develop. After three months of life in the water the tadpoles have reached the last stage of their metamorphosis and become adults. They then leave their birthplace for life in the air. At the first signs of cold weather the tree frogs come down to earth and find a hole in the ground to bury themselves in. There they hibernate.

If a tree frog is well fed and kept in a moist, comfortable environment, it gets along well in captivity. They have even been known to reach the advanced age of more than twenty years. Some people believe that they can predict changes in the weather from the movements of a captive tree frog, but this is a superstition.
A tree frog in captivity needs branches, or a little ladder, or anything else on which it can climb. Otherwise, it languishes, gets thin and dies.

Tree Frogs Pictures