Photo taken on Oct 04, 2014

Russian fairy tale “Teremok” is as enigmatic for me as many others. A mouse found a house, than invited a frog to live together, then a hair joined them. And then a Fox came, and the small game, instead of shutting windows tightly and sitting very quietly, reports to the carnivore the menu card list of dwellers and invites her to live with them. After that, the same happens with a wolf. How? What does all that mean?

Recently, we walked in a park with Max and I saw a man pointing his camera into withered grass. Just before us a walking couple came to him and asked: “What are you looking at?”, and he explained: “There, a mouse is eating a frog”. They pointed to the scene with cameras and fingers for some more time and went away, and then we took there place. Here, really. I pointed my camera into the scene, too. Then I took Max a little bit closer, pointed my finger at the mouse and tried to explain — there, look, there is a mouse! Look there, look.

The mouse didn't care, it sat less than in 1,5 m from us and our conference didn't bother it — maybe that was due to tough autumn fat-saving deadlines, or just the food was so incredibly tasty. After that, “Teremok” became even more enigmatic for me. I thought that someone could make up a shrilling story: a mouse lures a frog into the house… and then does the same with other animals, larger and larger.

I googled for “mouse eats frog”. Google offered me a pack of ”frog eats mouse” videos. From one guide I learned that many mice eat insects among other types of food. Probably this one was a poor student in biology and made a mess of things. If anyone has links to information about mice feeding on frogs — please share. And if someone recognizes the species of the rodent in spite of lack of visual information — I will be very grateful, too.

species Striped field mouse Apodemus agrarius
species European common brown frog Rana temporaria