I wake early and fumble my way downstairs to boil the kettle and let Tos out. She doesn’t come and I’m glad, for the door opens to a wall of sound, of frogs croaking in the darkness. I tip-toe out so as not to disturb them but I fail and they disappear with a splash into the depths of the water. Sorry, frogs. Still, by torchlight I can see the first glistening blob of frogspawn in the shallows. My heart!
I spend the day watching the pond through binoculars from an upstairs window. I count around 50 frogs, although it’s hard to say exactly as they’re moving around so much. It’s the usual, vigorous affair: males and females in amplexus, males trying to knock other males off females, males chasing anything that moves, in big, bubbly splashes. I home in on the expanding blueish balloons the males make as they croak, at the bubbles that float and pop on the surface, on the most perfect, stripy frog legs splayed in the water. I watch couples climb on to blobs of spawn as if to claim them as their own, I watch a frog leap into the garden and land in the pond with a splash (‘I’m here!’). I watch what I think is an actual blob of spawn being laid. I watch magic, it’s all magic.
And yet there’s an unease that comes with these things these days. Last spring was so dry and this spring seems to be going that way, too. After the sodden winter, we haven’t seen rain for weeks and the pond is already looking low. A low pond in spring isn’t normal – the whole ecosystem is set up so there’s water for frogs to spawn in, which remains there at least until the froglets emerge in early summer. I have water butts to top the pond up if I need to but it’s just another reminder that things are falling apart. It’s hard, sometimes, trying to enjoy natural, wonderful events, trying to keep the clawing sense of unease at bay, trying to ignore the new context of the story.
The frogs are also early. Not horribly so, but four days earlier than 2022 and nine days earlier than 2021. It’s only their third year of spawning, so it’s too soon to blame climate change. But a nine-day jump in three years seems a lot. Like the low water level in the pond, it could be nothing, but I feel uneasy. There’s still a lot of ‘winter’ to go. There’s still a risk of a late cold spell, of plunging temperatures and frozen frogspawn. Frogs have evolved to spawn in early spring, they can deal with a bit of ice, that’s why they spawn in the sunniest, shallowest parts of the pond – the ice melts here soonest after a cold night. But they can’t cope with a deep freeze. They can’t cope with massively fluctuating temperatures; early spring one day and deepest winter the next. They have not evolved the mechanisms to deal with this.
I’m determined to enjoy it anyway. I battle on, watching the spawn, watching the splashes, telling Twitter. And at night I stick to my plan: I have lived here for four years and the frogs have been spawning for just three, but I have established a new ‘tradition’, which is to sleep in the spare room when the frogs are spawning, so I can open the window and fall asleep listening to their croaks. I pretend everyone fell asleep listening to croaking frogs in the olden days, and that I’m channelling my inner early human.
I go to bed early so I can lie in the dark and hear them, willing myself to not sleep, not yet. My body is tense as I try to focus on the sound of frogs over people – the cars and the level crossing of the high street, the ships and horns of the port. It’s only 9.30 p.m. so there are neighbours about, too, talking, putting the bins out for tomorrow’s collection. Beneath this chatter and traffic is the low, constant hum of frogs. My body relaxes. I lie on my back so both ears can absorb the sound and I stay still so there are no rustles to interrupt it.
Despite my efforts I fall asleep quickly, but I wake periodically and am greeted by frogs. Unwavering, they have been spawning and calling the whole time, and in the dead of night the sounds of people are fewer and the sounds of frogs are greater. I would like to sleep in the garden in a tent but I worry about disturbing them. I would like to sleep in the garden in a tent but it’s February and I would have a horrible time. So I sleep in the bedroom that backs on to the garden and I listen carefully to the croaks, to this ancient sound that belongs in my human ears. Finally, I feel good.
What other sounds have we lost? Other sounds that used to help us tell the time – of the day, of the month, of the year? Sounds that used to be so ubiquitous, sounds that we don’t even know have gone? We still hear birdsong but there are fewer members of the chorus – both in diversity and abundance. What birds sang in these parts 200 years ago? Cuckoos? Nightingales? Curlews? Corncrakes? The buzz of a bumblebee, the snore of a hedgehog, it’s all so quiet these days. What does a badger sound like? I don’t actually know. I hate that we have evolved ourselves away from the very best of life. That we have replaced it with endless, pointless crap, and have the audacity to call this ‘progress’.
I still don’t know where the frogs have come from. Are there other ponds nearby they have ditched in favour of mine? Have ponds been dug and then filled in as the homes and gardens changed hands? I know of three that have been lost: the pond a few doors down that Twiggy’s mum told me about, and the dumped preformed pond I found in the twitten behind my house when I moved in. Another, two roads away, that was lost a few years ago. That’s the thing about gardens: the habitats are temporary. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; wild ponds are temporary, too. But if the general trend is to fill in, rather than dig ponds, then the species that use them will suffer. The frogs and the toads, but also the newts and the hedgehogs and the bats, along with the thousands of freshwater invertebrates who call garden ponds home. I haven’t yet met anyone in the neighbourhood who has a living pond in their garden, besides my neighbour Kate, who dug hers a few weeks after I dug mine, and now the neighbours next to Johnny. Where were the frogs spawning before we turned up?
A hundred years ago there were ponds in the park. It wasn’t a park then but a ‘waste ground’ left fallow after being used to mine sand and flints at the turn of the last century. Craters were left by the mines and, naturally, they filled with water. One of them was huge, over three metres deep, and was fed by a ‘natural spring’. (I am interested to read about the natural spring, and wonder if it can be revived.) This area would have been rich with frogs, toads and newts, perhaps even great crested newts, as the many craters would have been used as the ‘satellite ponds’ that this species needs. But in 1936, some kids decided to sail boats over the largest pond in the dead of winter, and one of them drowned. For completely unfathomable reasons that I suspect had everything to do with money and nothing to do with the well-being of the local community, the council decided to fill it in, not with soil but with refuse. Imagine turning up for your annual orgy to find your party site filled with glass and early plastics, like the first disposable razor blades (I may have gone down a rabbit hole of ‘refuse of the ages’ here.) The poor frogs, where did they go after their home became a rubbish dump?
Sometimes I wish I had been born before the Industrial Revolution but I’m gay and a woman so I would probably have been drowned (who am I kidding? I would have died in childbirth). But I can’t get past how noisy and colourful life would have been back then. How loud the birdsong and the frog croaks, the buzzing of bees. How thick the clouds of insects and bats, how full the summer skies of swifts and swallows. How many butterflies there would have been, dripping from wildflowers (how many wildflowers there would have been). How, when walking past a snoring hedgehog in summer, no one would have batted an eyelid. I could have lived in the woods! I could have lived in a little wooden shack at the edge of the woods and eaten porridge and leaves, greeted hedgehogs with big toothless grins. I could have moved frogspawn laid in puddles to my little garden pond. I could have grown herbs, a few vegetables, all to a soundtrack of song, of wild chatter. Life would have been hard, I don’t doubt that, but it would have been so full of life.
I do enjoy bits of modern life. I’m terrible at being a consumer, terrible at being anything other than scruffy. I rarely get my hair cut or buy new clothes. But I like dancing. I like nightclubs and festivals and bowling around with my favourite idiots. I love travel (although I’m conflicted about that these days). I love sleeping in a warm bed with the window open listening to frogs, I love that I don’t have to sleep in a tent. And I’m lucky. I know how lucky I am to have these privileges.
I am here and I am now on this little patch of land not far from the sea, where there were once meadows and a windmill and a fresh spring and who-knows-what-else, which is now a busy suburb of a high street, close to shops and a port. There are frogs. I have a pond and binoculars and windows. Times have changed, the weather is changing. But I can top the pond up if it doesn’t rain, I can raise frogspawn indoors if temperatures plummet. I can lie in bed and listen to the ancient sounds of our oldest friends. It will never be a cabin in the woods but if I close my eyes and listen I can make myself love now. Just for a moment, just for as long as the frogs continue to sing.
The sun is yellow and the sky is blue! How can I stay away from the garden? I steal an hour outside with Tos. We open the door to light and song, to whistles and clicks and stammers and wheeees, to a flock of starlings on the roof. There’s a blackbird nearby too, a robin and, somewhere, distantly, a dunnock. It feels like spring, it feels like hope.
Most of the garden has remained untouched since summer: it’s all seedheads and skeletal remains, piles of leaves and curiously untouched berries (even curiouser is that it’s just one stem of untouched berries, the rest have all been eaten). But there’s a whiff of new growth and life, of daffodil, snowdrop and crocus shoots, of buds revealing themselves in the still-cold soil. ‘Who are you?’ I ask the buds. ‘Who are you and when did I plant you and what will you become and will you look good?’ I’m going to find out so soon.
I allow myself some gentle tidying, just on the sunny side, so emerging shoots and buds have room and light to grow. It’s easy to come into the garden in late winter and clear everything away, but this removes shelter from hibernating insects. Gentle trimming is key, leaving plenty intact to protect the sleepy.
I start at the far end, the new border I planted in late summer. I clear old hellebore leaves to make more of the opening flowers, remove the underskirt-like foliage of foxgloves and rose campion, beneath which bulbs are trying to push through. I move, gently, towards the house, avoiding spikes of snowdrop and crocus flowers, smiling at buds of hazel and rose leaves.
I cut back stems of ice plant, catmint, penstemon and Verbena bonariensis. I prune out rosehips that, until recently, were being eaten by squirrels but are now black and mushy and seemingly not as delicious. I weed out crocosmia shoots (there are always crocosmia shoots) and a bit of spurge but not all of it; everything is allowed to live here in moderation. The sun has finally climbed high enough in the sky to warm a few inches of soil and there I find masses of new seedlings I can’t yet identify. I want them to be foxgloves or ox-eye daisies, bird’s foot trefoil or clovers, plants I can use in the borders or new meadow out the front. I’ll probably be disappointed. Still, I leave them to reveal themselves in time.
I would love to mulch the soil or tickle the surface with my three-pronged cultivator to make it all look fluffy and nice but that would kill the mystery seedlings, damage emerging bulbs and potentially disrupt hibernating insects. I would love to mow the lawn to make it all straight and neat. I would love to clear the shady side of the garden, too, clear leaves and sticks. I am eager for spring, for new growth, for the garden to be mine again. I resist; it’s still so early, just some gentle cutting back will do for today.
While I potter, Tos helps herself to sticks. She takes fresh twiggy stems from my clippings bucket, partially composted prunings from the rough mulch I laid in autumn, entire branches from the habitat pile. She prances around with them, then lies down to chew them for a bit, and then abandons them in scatters on the lawn.
‘Tosca,’ I say helplessly. The new and composted prunings are soft enough but I confiscate the branches in case she splits them while chewing and splinters her mouth. She then finds a champagne cork, which, again, is partially decomposed and has come from the patch of mulch I am suddenly regretting not sieving. We play with it for a while, me throwing it for her to chase and then drop at my feet, until it disintegrates into so many pieces that it, too, is confiscated and returned to the compost bin.
‘Woof,’ she cries.
‘I know, life’s tough,’ I reply.
It’s not just the rough mulch where there are sticks and stems to find. The whole garden is ‘littered’ with planty remains. They seem ungainly now, with so little else to draw the eye, but they’ll soon disappear beneath foliage and flowers, beneath the paws of hedgehogs and foxes, beneath new leaf litter, where they will slowly rot as nature intended. Tosca will find some, of course. And so will the birds: every spring I watch gulls gathering beakfuls of my sticks and flying them to the rooftops; I see house sparrows and starlings taking smaller, twiggy stems to the nooks and crannies of holey houses; magpies and crows taking them to the large sycamores in the park, the magpies returning to take pond mud to make a nice deep cup (I admit to wishing they wouldn’t). Wood pigeons labouring over the perfect stick. This one? No. This one? Still no. Funny how they’re so fussy with their stick picking but use them to make the most ridiculously flimsy nests.
Tosca watches me from the bench, which is now, after months of darkness, in full sun. In summer there’s a bench cushion, which inevitably she has claimed as her own and she lies sleepily on it, watching me garden. She stands now on the hard wood as if to say, ‘Bench cushion, please,’ and I pretend I haven’t noticed. I collect her discarded sticks from the lawn and return them to the habitat pile, along with my bucket of old plant stems and soggy rosehips. They go to the open heap rather than the closed bin in case they are harbouring insects, although I checked them as best I could when I cut them back. How awful it must be to wake from winter sleep to the dark, damp tomb of a closed compost bin, with no means of escape. Any insects in today’s prunings still have their shelter, just a few metres away from where they intended it. When they wake they will be able to fly away or move further into the heap if they want to. They’re protected from rain under the lip of the shed roof, from wind and frost and snow. They are safe there. Safe to sleep and wake and fly and simply get on with the business of being insects. Even after I’ve done a little tidying.
It’s my birthday and I have snowdrops and hellebores to plant. I hack into frost-kissed soil with a hand fork and make space for bulbs and rootballs and fill them in and water them. Not ideal conditions but never mind, they’ll be fine.
It’s gone cold again, as the weakening jet stream brings more Arctic weather south of where it should. Temperatures here are dipping to 7ºC (feels like 0ºC), but in California again temperatures are plummeting to -18ºC as ice storms bring snow and flooding to a region already hammered by ‘once in a lifetime’ weather events over the course of winter. Here, I worry about the frogs, about the bumblebees I have already seen out of hibernation, about the hedgehogs. Again, the up-and-down cycle of mild then cold weather is no good for wildlife. If we have a deep freeze, how will I protect the frogspawn?
There would be a lot to protect; the frogs have almost completely filled the pond now. I’ve lost count of the number of blobs and there’s no way of knowing, congealed together as they are. After seven days there are still around 50 individuals going at it, with yet more arriving to the garden. I watch them land in the pond with a muted splash and then burrow through spawn to reach water. Mated females have left the pond already but many of the males have stuck around. This means there are now more males than females, which means mating balls are starting to form. Mating balls occur when two or more males cling to a female in the hope of being the one that gets to spawn with her. Science suggests this could be in the female’s best interests, as only the strongest, most determined male will win, and she may even encourage them to compete for her. But it often backfires: in an attempt to unseat their rivals, the males make the ‘ball’ roll around and around, often with long periods under water. She can drown.
I see two legs poking through pondweed and spawn, which don’t look right. I sit on the bench and watch. Sure enough, the legs are part of a mating ball, which is frantically being rolled by at least two males, it’s hard to tell. The female is dead; it is her pale, stiff legs I spot in the water. The males, I expect, are young and overexcited. I fish her out and they quickly jump off her. She’s been dead a while, poor thing, her tongue hanging out and the skin of her legs and belly rubbed clean off. What a way to go.
I think there’s another mating ball but it’s so hard to tell, with everything else that’s going on in the water and the floating mass of spawn concealing everything. I anticipate, with sadness, fishing out more dead bodies.
I feel like the season is coming to an end, that most frogs have been and gone, that the garden is emptying of them. At night I still steal into the spare room and open the window to listen to them, waking periodically to the comforting sound of croaks. Each morning I go out and mutter expletives at the sheer number of frogs and eggs, at what the garden might look like when the froglets start leaving the pond. At the falling level of pond water.
The pond is drying out, gradually receding with every frog splash. This, so early in the year, doesn’t bode well for summer. Many frogs have spawned where they usually spawn, in the far shallows where the sun hits the water first thing in the morning, but others have now spawned in what’s usually deeper water. I’m keeping an eye on it; I don’t want to fill the pond and interfere with the frogs’ intended placement of spawn, but I don’t want the spawn to dry out or freeze, either. So far I’ve added a bit of rainwater from my water butt, and used a rose on my watering can to ‘water’ the spawn gently, so it feels like rain. As the water recedes, the spawn becomes more exposed – my job is to ensure it remains just slightly under the surface.
As yet, there is no sign of toads. The next cold spell will last for a week and then afterwards, who knows? It might rain. It might be 20ºC. If they don’t come soon, then when?
Common frog, Rana temporaria
The common frog is the best-known British amphibian and is found throughout Britain and Ireland in almost any habitat where there’s a suitable pond to breed in. Gardens are extremely important to frogs, and many regional populations depend on garden ponds for their survival.
They’re funny-looking things, with smooth moist skin, striped legs (the back legs are longer than the front) and an angular head and body shape. They have large, goggly eyes on the side of their head and they usually have a black patch behind each eye, in which their ears are visible as black drum-like circles that pick up vibrations. They can be olive-green or brown in colour, but are sometimes found in shades of yellow, orange, red, green, brown and even blue. They can grow up to 9cm long.
