You Should Build a Frog Pond

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For most people, discovering a frog living in your fence post would make you feel either kind of creeped out or kind of charmed. For one guy in Australia, it was a challenge: He decided to make it the sweetest pad possible. In a now-viral two-minute TikTok video, he designs and 3-D-prints his frog an elaborate home. He keeps adding features until the lucky amphibian has an attached pool, a downstairs mating pond with a tadpole ramp, and a predator-proof safe room.

This frog house was gleefully over the top, practically engineered to go viral with its renovations for “increased ribbit amplification” and a brushtail possum who occasionally likes to drink water from the pool. But frog houses as an idea that bird feeding goes back at least 3,500 years; in the 18th century, the facades of Ottoman palaces and mosques structures to house birds, who were seen as both holy and lucky. Birdhouses and bird feeders are so thoroughly part of human culture that purple martins in eastern North America nest almost in houses made by humans.