Save The Frogs!

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I’m so glad our taxpayer money goes to something like this:

A Contra Costa County water supplier has laid eight miles of pipe across rural grasslands to prevent California red-legged frogs from drying out and dying in the blistering summer heat.

The $163,000 project delivers water to 16 artificial ponds, breaking new ground in helping the threatened frog species celebrated in Mark Twain’s story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

“It’s unusual to create ponds for these frogs, but I don’t know of anyone delivering them water,” said Mike Nepstad, a federal biologist who approved the irrigation project in 2002 when he worked for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

The Contra Costa Water District created the water system last year to boost the frog’s survival on lands near the district’s Los Vaqueros Reservoir south of Brentwood.

It works like this:

??Water is pumped from January through March to the ponds so they stay wet long enough for the baby red-legged frogs to grow up and hop off to underground burrows in fall.

??The district cuts off water flows in time for the ponds to dry up in fall. This prevents non-native bullfrogs, which eat red-legged frogs, from invading the ponds.

Before the Gold Rush, the red-legged frog was abundant throughout California.

Doesn’t that just warm your heart? Freakin lunatics I tell ya.