I have had the most exciting of weekends! OK, so it rained most of the time and was
pretty cold, and the milk curdled in my tea and my filing cabinet was delivered
late and Z had a cold and couldn’t meet up and I didn’t get home from work
Saturday until 1:30 in the morning – but all that is as nothing to me, because
the taddies have almost completed their metamorphosis into froglets.
Saturday afternoon I skipped into the garden while there was
a wee break in the rain to check up on the taddies, and Low! and Behold! there
was squirming at my feet and every moss-covered rock near the pool’s edge was
covered in emerging froglets!
Now most people don’t realise this, but frogs do not emerge
from the pond fully formed and in perfect frog shape. The transformation is gradual, first the hind
legs grow, and then the front ones, and then the tail is slowly reabsorbed into
the body until only a little stub is left, and the transformation from tadpole
to frog is complete. A new frog is
absolutely tiny and very cute, only the size of a small fingernail.
They tend to leave the pond after a good downpour, because the
fragile little creatures get easily dried out by the sun and if the land is wet
they have a better chance of making it to the nearest shady crevice. If there has been a long dry spell, they
usually jump (literally!) at the chance to leave the pond at the first heavy
rainfall, even if the transformation from taddie to froggie is still incomplete
– they simply can’t take the chance that this is the last rain of the season,
because missing it may mean having to emerge in the baking heat and shrivelling
up and dieing on their first day of frogdom.
In such circumstances the froglets often emerge from the pond with a
long tail still attached.
This year has been so consistently wet that the taddies have felt no need to hurry. Instead of emerging from the pond in one fell swoop and once and for all, they seem to have decided to do the business much more leisurely and gradually. Whenever there is a little rain, and/or the rocks surrounding the pool are moist, they hop and waddle out of the water and lay on the rocks, trying out the new medium, as it were. If they feel threatened, or the air gets dryer, they just wriggle back into the pond.
During the last ten years or so since I had frogs in the pond I have never seen such a thing. In every other year they left the pond in one go, usually in August or September. Before then, they hid somewhere in the pool. But this year’s unhurried behaviour is consistent with their attitude of the previous year, when they refused to leave the pond altogether and were still cavorting in its leafy shallows in November. This race of tadpoles/frogs has developed a laid back approach to life which I, in my capacity as surrogate mother, find not a little disturbing. How ever are they going to survive in the harsh world that is my garden? Will they be easy prey to the birds and hedgehogs and foxes who haunt my few square yards? And what about surviving the winter? Will they knock on the kitchen window right around Christmas time and demand I take them in and put them up during sub-zero temperatures? All 8,546 of them? It doesn’t bear thinking about!
PS You notice the stickleback over the rim of the bowl? A big and fearsome bruiser, you have to admit!
