On that note:
Posted on 08/21/2005 11:18:23 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
PICTURE this: French hunters stealing out at night in pairs, one with a torch to light up the eyes of their prey, the other armed with a .22 calibre rifle equipped with a telescopic sight and a silencer.
Their quarry? Invaders from the United States - bullfrogs, to be precise, that bellow like cows and typically weigh in at a hefty 600 grams.
This is France, to be sure, but the end game of this hunt is not sauteed frog legs.
These marksmen are ecologists, out to exterminate the bullfrogs - a.k.a. Rana Catesbeina - which are threatening the local ecosystem.
"A man living in Vayres (30 kilometres, 20 miles east of Bordeaux) stocked his pond with them in 1968 as a joke, and a few years later every stretch of water in the region was full of them," said Luc Gueugneau, who works in the government agency overseeing wild animals and hunting.
The bullfrogs live for as long as nine years, hibernating from October to March, but the rest of the time gorging on local frogs, shellfish, insects, and even fledgling birds, said ecologist Mathieu Detaint.
They have virtually no predators, and each lay up to 25,000 eggs a year, against 10,000 laid by the local frogs.
"We tried draining the ponds, but it costs a lot and is not efficient enough because there are always some bullfrogs that remain," Detaint said.
One thing that did work, though, he said, was trapping the tadpoles and very young frogs in nets.
Said Gueugneau: "For the moment, hunting the adults with rifles has proved to be the most efficient way of attacking them, because it gets rid of those able to reproduce."
The hunting is done at night, as that is when the frogs are most active and easiest to spot.
"We carried out five hunts between September last year and this July, killing about 120 of them," Detaint said.
"At the start, the idea seemed ludicrous, but we became convinced little by little because they allowed us to eradicate all the adults at two sites where the system was tested."
The ecologists say they a full-scale eradication programme should be in place by 2007, and hope to fully eliminate the bullfrogs in five or 10 years.
On that note:
Oui!
bttt
As served at the Chateau Auberge du Lac on the Quebec side of Lake Memphranaug. Now that's some eatin', particularly if you have a very nice, very dry, very, very cold white in the bucket.
What? What? You though I ate nothing but lobster and moose steaks?
The second word on that wine label doesn't look like it begins with an "S"...
A real F is in the word French above the S.
"for a six" is that anything like a 'home run'?
Hey LEL! It's good to see you back on!
A "six" is a cricket term for hitting the ball over the fence on the full. It equals six runs. Maybe "six home runs"?
Yep! Over the fence in baseball is a homer! This cross cultural exchange is so edifying!
Mais oui, FrPR, certainment your mastery of Passamaquoddy orthography, as well as the Internet is most impressive, non? However, with les Cuisses de Nymphes a l'Aurore, on y demande an ice-cold Sancerre, ne c'est pas?
Just because we DownEasters have the earflaps on our chapeaux does not mean we cannot hear la musique. But who gave you le permis to put the website out there for all those Massholes to see?
What if Ted, their dipsomaniacal Senator, decides to cross a rustic bridge in his Oldsmobile with a jeune fille other than his époux? Not only will it kill fish, but it will attract his constituents. Both very bad things.
Your waste of precious bandwidth on Frogs, frogs,(I can never remember whether the people or the amphibian are capitalized, so I left it ambiguous) and which wine goes with which whine, not to mention shameless plugging of the Chateau Auberge du Lac on some unpronounceable and unspellable lake in a foreign land to our North. Then I was forced to endure inchoate ramblings about some incredibly boring sport named after an insect, on the part of some crocodile wrestler from the appropriately named Down Under. Enough! It's all just a bit much for me to bear.
Of course, I am reporting you all to Jim Robinson (probably a real person). Far more serious the consequences when I write you up with Shermy.
This is a warning and will be placed in your Freeper personnel file.
Ribet!
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