Frog Focus

This is a green frog on the move. After spending his summer in a breeding pond, he is now in search of deeper waters to spend the winter. I think we were both equally surprised to encounter each other in the woods of my backyard. 
He can be identified as a male by his yellow throat, which develops during the summer breeding season, and his relatively large tympanum or frog ear, muchlarger in males than females. Maybe he needs these to fine-tune his music, a call like the plucking of a bass banjo string. At the height of summer here in Tennessee, there can be delightful but unintentional harmonies between bluegrass musicians and the green frogs calling from nearby ponds. I may be the only audience for this inter-species duet, since everyone else seems pretty focused on the human half of the outdoor concert.
To emphasize the characteristic bulging eyes, I shot this with my camera almost on the ground, and with the frog at a very slight angle to catch the protruding pupils. Frogs can see almost 180 degrees, looking forward, sideways, and partly behind them. This is useful for a creature that spends most of its time eating, or avoiding being eaten. As I was shooting his portrait he sat very still for several minutes, perhaps mesmerized by the wonder of my unblinking giant eye also known as a macro lens. In turn, I was enchanted by the way he looked both at me and everywhere else at the same time.