Hunker down, it’s another weekend of raining frogs
IT’S been raining frogs in recent days, as the old saying goes. As if to underline the point, a great seething mass of frog spawn has suddenly appeared in the corner of my pond, bubbling up like lava from some underwater volcano.
It’s a mammoth pile of the stuff but laid in such abundance with good reason, I suppose, as apparently 90 per cent of the eggs, tadpoles and young frogs will be eaten by the other pond critters before they reach maturity.
Even with this knowledge, my wife and I are still proving strangely protective over our new garden pearls, heading out at least once a day to file progress reports to each other. Today they are still there, quivering on the surface like jellied eels.
Raining frogs is a saying steeped in folklore and comes from the apparent ancient belief that the sun somehow sucked frogspawn into the clouds to later deposit fully-fledged amphibians back down to Earth with a squelch.
There have been numerous reports of this phenomenon occurring throughout history. From the Greek philosopher Heraclides Lembus in the 2nd century BC to Croydon in 1998 when a shocked homeowner discovered hundreds of dead frogs littering her suburban gardens.
That particular event was eventually attributed to a so-called water spout, when high winds whip up a watery tornado and deposit any creature unfortunate enough to be sucked up in the melee some distance away.
The Ancient Greek frog rain theories have been debunked in the modern era. However, the phrase itself endures as a suitably water-logged description of the endless downpours over the past week.
And on it all goes. I’m afraid to say this weekend still looks wet and wild for many – enough to make one hunker down under a lilypad and sit it all out until spring.