How to help frogs in your Ark
• Frogs need water to live in. Over 50% of Ireland’s amphibian wetlands have been lost over the last 100 years. So, one of the best ways you can support one of our important keystone species is by creating a pond in your ark. They like ponds with shallow edges and lots of rough, long grass around the margin with some scrubby areas to give cover for them on their terrestrial foraging adventures. Don’t put sh in your pond, as they will eat the frogspawn and the tadpoles. Build it, and they will nd it. It’s very rewarding.
• Provide cover and places for them to hibernate. Large rocks, or piles of stones, big tree trunks left to rot, or log piles, and thick diverse native hedgerows will be really helpful to them. Put a few stones or branches into the pond to provide a ramp or a step for the baby froglets to make their way out of the pond to start their adult lives.
• Organise a community clean-up of your local river, stream or pond. It is a very important contribution to our wild creatures and a rewarding one.
• Don’t use chemicals in your Ark! Spraying weedkiller is something which has to stop. Glyphosate is not, as it says on the label, harmless. These are watersoluble chemicals which are incredibly devastating to aquatic ecosystems. They wash and soak into the water table and drains, which then enter our water systems, our rivers, streams and lakes and kill everything in sight. Petroleumbased fertilisers are another disaster. Ammonium nitrate granules, the common agricultural fertiliser, will kill a frog in ve minutes if it gets into the water. The toxins from car exhausts and from car tyres are entering freshwater bodies where they are also stressing and killing frogs and their aquatic communities.
• Campaign to stop the onslaught of chemicals we are imposing upon the natural world. When you see the facts and gures on the quantities of various chemical applications that we seem to have convinced ourselves we cannot live without in agriculture and gardening, it truly is mind boggling that we haven’t wiped everything out already. So, more than ever, we need to provide them with as many clean water sources as possible, to support them to survive and thrive, until the lobby groups lose their stranglehold and we all cop on.