Urban bliss as pond’s breeding frogs keep me utterly ribbited
THIS week something amazing has happened.
At 6am, before work, I put on my dressing gown and went into my freezing back garden for the first time in months.
I was venturing out to grab some weeds (sow thistle, campanula and ivy-leaved toadflax if you are interested) for my newly awake tortoise.
If you are wondering why a tortoise has come out of hibernation when it is two degrees outside, we are in the same boat.
I am frankly furious with Gary that he woke up about two months early.
It meant that I had to arrange for someone to come in to feed him when I was on holiday last week.
Unlike dealing with a human threeyear-old, I can’t just shout at him and send him back to bed.
If a tortoise wakes up during the hibernation period, they probably won’t go back to sleep.
This means that it would sit in a box, in my shed, just burning up its energy reserves and I would open his box to be greeted by an empty shell. Anyway, back to the amazing thing. I went out looking for weeds. As usual I couldn’t be bothered to put my shoes on, so I went out in my woolly socks.
Anyone who has ever done this will know that there is a fine art to walking on damp paving slabs in socks.
You need to pick your way, only putting your tip-toes down where the slab is dry.
Really experienced outdoor sockwalkers will be able to recognise if that cold feeling in your feet is liquid coming in or if it is just the cold penetrating your woollies.
Whoops, it seems I have yet again become distracted from the point I was trying to make...
I was manoeuvring across my Adamsdown garden when I bent over to pull up a particularly juicy bit of campanula.
Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed my pond. Something was different. Instead of the random fag ends that the people next door normally throw over my fence, there was something else.
Glistening on the water line was an enormous splat of frogspawn.
Oh joy!
Oh rapture!
All winter I have hoped for this. Three years ago I became so overwhelmingly miserable about the lack of greenery around Broadway.
I was in a world of split-open bins and concrete.
The only bits of nature I could find consisted of dog poo and angry (and, judging by the time of year, horny) seagulls.
I got so annoyed by this I went into my back garden and started digging. I dug until I had a hole that came up to my knee. As I am not the tallest, I kept going until about waist depth.
In this I put a liner and filled up my first pond.
I have always loved nature and wanted my own pond. I have no interest in fish, what I want is amphibians.
After the first winter I waited and hoped that I would get some frogs or newts. May came around and all I had was algae and one solitary water boatman.
The next year I decided to bring the frogs to me.
I drove back to my home town of Northampton and took about 30 tadpoles from my uncle’s pond.
These grew into little frogs and then
I realised one key problem with my little garden paradise. I had built the pond on a raised flower bed. This meant that if the baby frogs left the immediate area of the pond (which they do) they would not be able to get up to it.
I therefore built a muddy staircase up to the flowerbed out of dirt and wire. Anyway, last spring I found that at least two frogs had grown up and laid a tiny amount of spawn. I was ecstatic. This grew and soon I had my second generation.
But then disaster struck.
New people moved into the house that backs onto mine and they brought with them a massive ginger cat.
I don’t know the name of this cat. Frankly, I don’t want to know. To me, it will always be known as the callous frog killer.
Twice this ginger swine has left a dead frog outside my door, presumably to mock me.
I feared it had killed off my frog population – but not so.
Despite the attempted froggy genocide from this red devil they have survived.
Screw you, Ginger – I hope you like my new Super Soaker!
Glistening on the water line was an enormous splat of frogspawn. Oh joy! Oh rapture! All winter I have hoped for this.