Day Four – Memory Four – Wading in a Buffalo Wallow

The challenge:

What is one of your favorite childhood memories involving water.  Preferably not in a swimming pool?  What was fun about it? What was special about it? Why do you remember it? Where were you?

I’m going to try to write up 365 memories this year.

So far I’ve been 2 hours late and a day behind.

It will probably get worse before January is over!

So lately I’ve been thinking about buffalo wallows.

The backyard I played in while growing up was a cow pasture.

Before it was a cow pasture, it was prairie. There were coyotes, antelope, prairie chickens, pheasant, quail – and buffalo.,

Our pasture had quite a few large depressions on a hillside between two creeks. Water gathered in the wallows and it would stay there for several days after a rain.

We loved to splash and wade in those buffalo wallows, squishing grass and mud between our toes with the water almost up to our knees. (we were pretty short then…)

Every spring, those buffalo wallows were full of little pollywogs or tadpoles.

We’d gather them up in canning jars, and cart them back to the house, where over several days’ time, we’d watch them turn into little baby frogs.

Once they turned into frogs we’d take them outside where they were thoroughly admired, their jumping skills assessed, and turn them loose.

And when the next spring rain came along, we’d start all over again with more pollywogs.

Caution:  I don’t know if any children will read this, or parents who might try to find pollywogs for their kids to watch grow, but when I googled Pollywogs to try to learn exactly how long it would take on average for a pollywog to turn into a frog, I found that frogs and tadpoles can transmit diseases to humans.

Two scary diseases, such as salmonella and tuberculosis.  (Check out the article here: http://frogsource.com/article/from-frogs-humans-disease-transmission

The article indicates that the salmonella can be a lot riskier for younger children, so I feel pretty lucky that we didn’t end up with any bad side effects from all the fun we had with pollywogs!