39) Strange house guests

This strange little fellow arrived on the door step the other day (uninvited).  It was (apparently) a tree frog.  It looked rather hot so I (rather helpfully/kindly) splashed some cold water on it.  The (tree) frog didn't seem to like this much (presumably because it is not necessarily that wet in trees - as opposed to ponds) and promptly spat some sort of (potentially poisonous) fluid at me, which luckily missed.  It then hopped into the kitchen and jumped several feet onto the wall, where it stuck with gravity-defying sureness.  I had read about bright green tree frogs in the Amazon jungle, whose poison the natives use to lace the tips of their arrows so that their victims become instantly paralysed and then die.  I even seem to remember it was a particularly agonising sort of death, although this may be just my memory or imagination playing tricks.

Whatever the truth concerning Amazonian tree frogs, I was not going to pick up this potentially lethal toxic frog in my hands, particularly after its attempt to paralyse me with a squirt of its noxious mucus.  In the end it seemed to decide, of its own accord, that our kitchen was not a forest and, indeed, it did not even have any trees in it ( I suspect it may have mistaken our 1970's fake oak look-alike kitchen units for a forest of local Quercus)  In great leaps and bounds it went back onto the balcony and then disappeared over the side.  Clearly frogs have to be very wary in France, with the local's penchant for frying their legs as a rather tasty entree.  No doubt they also have to watch out for the many different birds of prey that circle on thermals, searching out juicy morsels in the landscape below.  Not surprising then that their first reaction (particularly when being drenched with cold water) is rather on the aggressive side.  But once he (or she) realised I meant no harm but was merely ignorant, we became the best of friends - it even smiled.