Re: (Frog hunting)

["philidor11" <philidor11@snet.net>]

HP Tim Williams wrote:
Here's a suggestion.  Instead of a 10m-long mad dash from your door to the
forest, sit up in a tree by the lake for a few hours.  Wear some camouflage.
Compare how many more frogs you can observe by sitting quietly above
their habitat versus how many you see crashing through the forest running
toward them.
The point?  Sit-and-wait predation vs active foraging.

To which you responded:
I'm talking of slow walking, not running, and trying to be quiet at that.
Camouflage is surely a good idea... Most trees here are barely 3 m high, so
"forest"... BTW, there's lots of reed there, plenty of hiding places for
frogs.

I have to ask:  why the camouflage?  Do frogs really have an acute sense of
wardrobe?
Also, frogs tend not to wander far from water.  Perhaps the prey HP Williams
spared was a toad?
Finally, the need to jump out of a tree seems to be reminiscent of the
Fennimore Cooper Indians.  Couldn't you just sit around and wait for a frog
in a likely spot?  Why go up a tree?
When speculating about this, what kind of prey would you need to leap on?
Why not something nearly as large as you are and capable of getting away
rapidly?  I'm thinking about the marsupial lion discussed before.  That
animal jumped out of trees to catch giant kangaroos and died out when
drought made the large prey disappear.
So, is there anything wrong with the assertion that to argue an animal
jumped out of trees, you have to have evidence of a reasonably big prey
animal?  (As well as evidence of said trees of such a type that there are
frequently branches of the right height.)