Thursday 20 April 2023
I’ve been a bit remiss about my patrols around the garden and round to the road of late. I take photographs of certain places around the area to hopefully get a better idea of how it all changes over the year. It had never occurred to me to take regular photos of the pond. Until I noticed hundreds of frog spawn.
As a child, I recall collecting frog spawn at school – did we collect it? I think so. Anyway, I have a recollection of awareness of frog spawn and watching it grow from a dot to a comma to wiggly dot with a longer ‘tail’. I suppose I should have remembered that growth would need to happen fairly quickly for a young child to stay interested. As an adult, I kind of forgot how quickly it changes. I last saw the mass of frog spawn, at a large, still comma size, on Sunday. Yesterday, the water was coming alive with wiggling frog spawn, most of it looking like it was trying to get back into its protective bubble. I possibly find it less cute than I used to as I’m not a massive fan of frogs (I’m happy with their fly management, I just don’t like the jumping and staring and seeing them splatted on the road).
I have had to Google frog spawn. It would appear that the tadpoles emerge from the jelly bubble-eggs after three or four weeks. I had noticed that there was less frog spawn after a couple of weeks than there had been. Their list of predators encompasses an awful lot of what we know is around these parts, including water boatman, which I think we have a lot of, birds and even foxes and pine martens. I didn’t know (remember) that once the tadpoles are formed enough to resemble frogs and go out and about, they’re called froglets (quite cute), becoming frogs at around three months. Hurrah, frogs also eat slugs and snails. Frogs are becoming of more interest to me now. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority, over 90%, do not make it to full frogness. The odds are not good for survival. This morning, it’s sunny but cool (I say “cool” but 3°C is actually winter-cold). Shortly before seven, I looked out the window and watched Mr and Mrs Pheasant wander across our front garden, squeeze under our gate and head to the neighbour’s bird feeder. As I watched their slow pootle towards the bird food, I realised a large hare was sitting in the garden in front of the daffodils.
