Always rely on frogs if you want to predict the weather

Humans seem to be obsessed about the weather. In England, it is customary to discuss what the weather is going to be like at every opportunity – I’m not sure why since everyone knows that it will rain anyway. For an English frog that’s probably pretty useful that it rains as then their lovely skin won’t dry out. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be too pleased if it actually started to rain frogs. Thankfully, I’ve never been caught up in such a bizarre and uncomfortable situation, but apparently there have been a number of such incidents recorded through history. As there are very few eye witness accounts, and since these phenomena have been documented by humans (with their tendency to exaggerate), who knows how reliable they are?

Anyway, I digress. Today, I wanted to talk about predicting the weather, which has turned into a multimillion dollar business. There’s a whole human science to the way it’s done involving fancy, high tech meteorological analyses and lots of complicated-sounding words and technical terms I can’t get my head round. Yet, we frogs have known about the weather for centuries and we’ve never had to rely on junk and nonsense like you.

Watch how well I swim compared to you!

Some humans guessed that we had some idea about what was going on but they had no idea about how to harness our secret skills. For example, in some countries, they would shove a frog in a jar filled with some water and insert a little ladder. These naïve humans decided that if the weather was going to get better then the frog would climb the ladder, whereas if it was going to rain the frog would go back down the ladder. Uh, hello? Who on earth came up with that crazy idea? Do you really think we climb ladders in the “wild”? I bet my ancestors had all sorts of fun fooling those crazy people who forced them into those jars. I’d have taken great pleasure in climbing up that ladder and watching you get drenched in a sudden downpour.

The real way to understand the weather is to simply watch us – yes that’s right – watch us and show us some respect, rather than squeezing us into uncomfortable glass containers and making us do stupid things. If we’re out and about, it probably means something exciting is about to happen…so get out there and learn something from us.