Jumping for joy

Iam no authority on the subject but it seems to me the frogs are later this year. Lest you think I have strayed into the disquieting terrain that is the political landscape of the EU referendum, I hereby do solemnly swear that I have not, and I further reassure you that I will not.

Andy Marr on Sunday morning with the German finance minister (polite, direct, mercifully brief), the former governor of the Bank of England (who was pushing a new book about… oh, who knows what it’s about?), and Boris (a sub-species of Trump with brains) was a last straw heaped on the camel’s back of my attention span, not to say my tolerance threshold.

I hung in there as long as I could, primarily because Andy Marr is one of the good guys, but my resistance finally collapsed somewhere around the point that Boris said “Let me explain why this is important” for about the 11th time and it never had been important for any of the previous 10.

So when I write that I think the frogs are later this year, I am not being derogatory about the French.

I mean actual frogs laying actual frogspawn in the ditches and dubs of the land are doing so later than in recent years.

Frogspawn is a fundamental symbol of nature’s commitment to the idea we call “spring”, and lest it has eluded your attention, the first of March was the first day of what the Met Office has suddenly taken to defining as “meteorological spring”, and since when winter has rather dug its heels in and the temperature has soared in Highland glens to –10C.

One chance

It is fundamental because, although magpies are gathering nest material and blackbirds have been defining their territories in song for a week now, they and many of the other tribes of nature can put the process of rebirth on hold if a late flourish of winter makes nonsense of spring.

But frogs only get one throw of the dice, one splurge of frogspawn per female frog. If they get it wrong, and it’s too cold for tadpole comfort, they simply die in their unhatched millions.

One frog lays a preposterous number of eggs.

Look at a frog in a ditch, look at the heaps of frogspawn it has just deposited with a self-satisfied smirk on its face (perhaps 5,000 embryonic tadpoles) and you wonder how they all fitted inside. So when a frog decides to lay, it helps – a lot – if the conditions are ideal.

Unfortunately, frogs are thick. Disastrous laying decisions are as thick on the ground as frogspawn in a ditch, and they know more ways of dying than any other creature I can think of.

But the first sighting of the first frogspawn is one of those harbinger moments on which some nature writers are wont to heap too much significance.

Guilty as charged and I have just been on a scouting mission.

Flanders Moss is a raised bog, a national nature reserve precariously constructed from water and peat, and held together with water-and-peat-loving plants, and populated by creatures as diverse as dragonflies, newts, lizards, adders, otters, pine martens, wrens, hen harriers, brown hares, meadow pipits and common gulls.

And foxes and wingless moths and other stuff. And bog cotton that bestrews the place with the magic of snow in midsummer.

Nothing

The Moss sprawls between the lowlying fields of the upper Forth in west Stirlingshire and the foothills of Highland mountains that rim the skyline from west to north. I checked the ditches first, because it is almost always where I find the earliest arrivals. Nothing. I checked a lovely secluded pool hidden in some fringing birches. Nothing. I set out along the boardwalk circuit that passes pool after pool after pool, and the whole place was as still as the grave.

I stopped often just to listen, because frogs on their spawning waters are chatty cabbages, and you often hear their mumbling, flatulent discourse before you see them.

I heard some far geese, some crows, a buzzard, and a huge green tractor on a distant road that could have given the Flying Scotsman a run for its money.

I walked on, took two steps and stopped dead. What was that? I listened as hard as I know how to listen. Nothing. But I was convinced there had been a syllable of frog. I edged towards the nearest water, a bottomless-looking peat-black pool enlivened by vivid green, glutinous mosses. And three small heaps of grape-like frogspawn.

A few stems of bleached-out winter-wearied grass curved over and bent down towards it as if they were taking a closer look, and suddenly, there in the midst of that drab little miracle was a decidedly blue-tinged and smirking frog.

I took one photograph before the thing disappeared, and here it is, just so that you can rest assured that at least one of nature’s creatures thinks it really is spring out there.

Tell me that doesn’t make you smile.

If they get it wrong, and it’s too cold for tadpole comfort, they simply die in their unhatched millions

Jim had a spring in his step when he spotted this frog.