What better way to spend hot summer days than in your own backyard pool? However, what many people don’t know until after they own a pool is that small creatures often fall into them and sometimes die from drowning. This is especially true for small wildlife creatures like frogs and chipmunks. And although, we can’t physically be there at the pool to help out a drowning critter whenever they fall in, we can help out by providing a tool to assist them in getting out! Rich Mason has invented the FrogLog — an inflatable platform that you attach to the edge of your pool to help any animals in need find a way back onto land.Pools are actually a death trap for small animals in your backyard. Thanks to Rich Mason there is now an invention called the FrogLog that’ll help save these helpless creatures.
“In June of 2004, good friends who had recently built an in-ground swimming pool on their wooded lot near Baltimore, Maryland, called to let me know frogs were dying in their pool,” he wrote on his official website.
“Because I’m a wildlife biologist, I’m the one who gets called when friends have snakes in their garage, that kind of thing,” Mason told The Dodo. “This friend was pulling out dead frogs every day from their pool … I was kind of shocked.”
He created a life-raft that small creatures could climb onto from the pool if they ever became trapped.
Mason decided to start some research of his own. Instead of finding information on why animals get trapped so often in pools, he found several pool owners seeking desperately for advice on how to save the creatures drowning inside their pools.
“Pretty much any animal that walks around a suburban neighborhood could fall into a pool eventually,” Mason said.
He initially had his friends try his invention out and wound up making another after another. “I bought some foam and made more devices and got feedback from more friends,” Mason said. “It was pretty altruistic, just about helping animals.”
Mason created the first prototypes by hand purely out of foam and fabric.
Therefore, the best way to check if the FrogLog was working was to see if any small bodies were in the pool during the mornings. The pools were more clear than before!
At this time, he was still working out of his garage! As FrogLog began growing more popular, he made it official and had them commercially available for people all over the world.
“I had my doubts when my husband ordered this,” one woman from Ontario wrote, “but then I saw a baby Eastern fox snake use it to get out of our pool. This snake is an endangered species.”
