They emerge early in the year, spawning from late winter, starting in the south-west of Britain, where it’s milder. The first frogspawn of the year is always recorded in West Cornwall in December. In Brighton they spawn in February, but not until April in the far north-east of Scotland. Frogspawn is laid in gelatinous clumps that look a bit like tapioca. It’s eaten by virtually everything, including newts, ducks and even foxes.
Frog tadpoles emerge black but soon turn brown and develop gold spots (unlike toad tadpoles, which remain black). They emerge as ‘froglets’ in summer, hopping about in long grass, trying to avoid the attentions of birds and other predators. Such a tiny percentage of tadpoles makes it to adulthood, there’s a lot riding on those first few days out of the pond.
It’s probably the easiest amphibian to cater for in gardens, as it will breed in a variety of water bodies. Frogs tend to favour small, shallow ponds (perfect for gardens!) with shallow ‘beach’ areas that warm up quickly in the late winter sun and mean there’s less chance of the spawn being lost to ice. Unlike toads, which seem to prefer larger, deeper ponds and remain loyal to the pond they started life in, frogs are more adventurous and will try new sites that aren’t always suitable – they often breed in puddles. So if you dig a pond, and you get the levels right (shallow, and gentle sloping sides are a must), you’re bound to attract frogs if they’re present in your area. And if they’re not in your area then dig a pond anyway – frogs and other amphibians can ‘smell’ water. If yours is the only garden pond for miles, it could provide any remaining frogs with a lifeline, and you never know who else might turn up.
March
It was cold for two weeks. The frogs stopped their shenanigans and bedded down in the depths of the pond while we humans that could afford to turned up our central heating. Before it turned cold it was warm – really warm. I took Tos up to the Downs on Valentine’s Day and wore a T-shirt. I found my first slow worm of the year and my first buffish mining bee, Andrena nigroaenea, feeding from snowdrops in the front garden. I saw bumblebee queens out of hibernation, the odd bursting of buds. And then it was winter again: frost on the shed roof, ice on the pond, hard, dry, ground. We can put a jumper on; what do the bees do?
While the frogs slept through the cold spell, my focus switched to hedgehogs. Suddenly the food in the feeding station was being taken, and so I topped it up properly and found it empty again the next morning, along with my first hedgehog poo of the year. It makes sense that it came to my garden as temperatures dipped, as it knew there would be kitten biscuits to make up for the sudden departure of earthworms. I put my camera out and watched footage of a chunky male hog licking his lips as he left the feeding station, and another of him coming into the garden via the back gate. It’s always reassuring to see when species have survived hibernation, especially when the weather is so changeable – they can’t be hibernating properly.
Temperatures eased a little for a while and the frogs started stirring again. Nothing like the vigorous parties of mid-February, but the odd blob of spawn would appear here and there, as subdued efforts to party were rekindled. But then there were reports of more ice and snow to come, of an ‘Arctic blast’. It wasn’t known where exactly, or for how long, but it would come. I pushed all the frogspawn beneath the surface of the water and topped up the pond to create an insulating later of water above the spawn, to give it the best possible chance of surviving. I watered plants that were already suffering from drought and which I didn’t then want to succumb to the cold. I waited. On the morning it got cold I walked to the gym, and arrived with a bright-red face and no feeling in my hands. But then it got mild again, and then cold again, and mild again, and then freezing. But there was no snow. I watched the telly, bemused at all the reports of snow, and wondered if it would come here. I texted family, ‘Have you got snow?’ And they said, ‘Yes!’ and sent pics of it falling and landing in great pillowy heaps. Then one weather report made everything clear: it showed a map of the UK that was all icy blue except for a thin ribbon of yellow on the south coast. Ahh, that explains it. The Arctic blast had just missed us.
Instead of snow we have rain. Two days of glorious, life-affirming rain. I take Tos out in it, wash my face in it, open the window so I can listen to it. I rejoice at full water butts and then half-empty them again so I can water the hedge by the wall and the bit of lawn beneath the shed roof. In the front I water the pots and the rain shadow of next door’s hedge, where very little grows. I stand at the kitchen window and watch raindrops land in great splashes in the pond, filling it to its absolute limit. Through binoculars I watch frogs. Lots and lots of frogs.
I count 30 frogs in the pond, just two weeks after around 50 of them had made their enormous spawn cushions. Thirty frogs leaping about, chasing each other, laying spawn. ‘They’re back,’ I say to Emma, and immediately ban Tosca from leaping around the garden. ‘They’re back and they’re spawning and my god, what are all these frogs going to look like in summer?’
I resume my little vigil at the bench, in the dark. It’s raining and the water is running down my back. I move to the edge of the pond to make myself slightly more comfortable, and shine my torch on amorous couples, of males jumping on females, of males biting the back legs of others who were already coupled up. On a newt. A newt? A newt!
She’s sitting at the edge, like she has always been there. A gravid female (full of eggs), she’s ignoring the frogspawn and eating a worm. A newt! In four years and two months the garden has its first newt. For a moment everything is perfect.
It’s often the way. In the wild, new ponds are formed and the frogs typically find them before other amphibians, taking advantage of fewer predators than in established ponds. They spawn and spawn and spawn, and it looks like they’re never going to stop, that there’s going to be too much, that there’s far too much for that one pond to support. But, gradually, it all gets eaten, by beetle and bug larvae, by dragonfly and damselfly nymphs, by birds and, eventually, by newts. When the frogs started spawning in such unfettered abundance, I knew it couldn’t last. ‘There are no newts,’ I would say to anyone who would listen. ‘It’s a new pond and there are no newts and they’re just taking full advantage.’
It makes sense that the newts would wait for a good population of frogs to establish before laying eggs of their own. And so, after three years of absolutely enormous amounts of frogspawn and tadpoles, the frogs have met their match.
I had an inkling newts had arrived, in December. There were bubbles coming to the surface of the pond, along with flashes of movement that were too quick for me to get my eye in. So they could have been here for months. And for the first newt I meet to be a gravid female suggests there are males here, too. You wouldn’t turn up to a pond full of eggs with no one around to fertilise them.
Tos wakes up for a wee at 4.30 a.m., and we let her out as she refused to go at 10.00 last night. ‘I’ll take her,’ I say, which is only so I can gawp at frogs and newts while she finds the perfect place to pee. I open the back door and I needn’t step out, there’s enough to keep me entertained on the doorstep: two toads. Oh rain, how I love you and all that comes with you. Two toads on the patio, making their way to the pond, 30 frogs in the water and a newt full of eggs. It’s going to be a busy few days.
The man who flew a drone at lesser black-backed gull nests last year is at it again. The peace is destroyed up to four times a day by scared, angry gulls launching into the air and crying out their piercing alarm calls. It sounds like they’re saying, ‘NO! NO! GET OFF! NO!’ Over and over and over. They’ve only just returned from their overwintering sites in West Africa. They’ve been here five minutes and already they’re being harassed. The herring gulls haven’t started collecting sticks from my garden yet but they have established their territories and both species have returned to the same nesting sites as last year. Which means they’re in trouble. The same people in the Facebook group are up in arms. ‘I’ll dig out the number of the PCSO I spoke to last year,’ says one. ‘I’ve got more footage!’ says another.
I decide this year not to take a back seat, not to read without comment. I post on the page: ‘Hello, would anyone like to meet up to discuss if we can work together to help the gulls?’ Three people say yes and two can make it for a drink in the local pub. I meet Lorna and Lin. Lin tells me to ‘look out for a tired old goth,’ while Lorna I recognise as she often stops to chat when I’m in the front garden. They bring photocopies of emails and I take my notebook. We assign tasks, swap information, give the man a nickname: Drone Bastard. I confess that I don’t actually live on their road and feel like an interloper. They don’t seem to mind. ‘Can we call ourselves Gulls Allowed?’ I ask, and they laugh. I will try to fight this man with humour and love; I will try not to be upset by him. I will try to get the police to turn up. They have one job – for the love of all the things, please, just turn up.
I haven’t seen my little gravid newt since that first night, but I have been putting the camera out and the hedgehogs have set it off while the frogs have been croaking so I’ve been able to gawp at chubby hedgehogs while listening to frogs. It’s a nice life if you can get it. In one of the clips, above the snuffling of the hedgehog and the low croaks of the frogs, I could just make out the squeaking of toads. Or one toad? Naturally, I aim to find out.
I’ve seen three toads in the garden so far this year. They’re small, warty things, standing still for ages. Males only. They seem less eager to get into the pond, less frantic and desperate than the horny frogs. Watching leaping frogs through binoculars from the bathroom window was extremely amusing. Toads, by comparison, seem almost prudish. Perhaps they’re young, perhaps they’re shy. I really hope the females turn up this year and show them what’s what.
Twiggy’s mum, Rachel, said she would keep an eye out for toads for me. She seemed open to the idea of me inspecting the twitten at night with a torch. Bits of rain are forecast now for the next few days, so more shy, prudish toads will be on the move. I will be on my bench in the dark, waiting for them.
Mid-March and it finally feels like spring. The sun is shining, there’s a gentle warmth out of the wind. There are hairy-footed flower bees fighting over lungwort, the first Eristalis tenax drone fly basking in the sunshine. A bald wet alien climbs up a daffodil stem and later reveals itself to be a newly hatched narcissus bulb fly. There’s a chiffchaff on the shed roof, the first tadpoles in the pond.
I sit in the front garden and marvel at my new meadow. It’s nearly looking good: daffodils provide colour and height, above the snowdrops my sister Ellie gave me for my birthday, and the first of the bright pink lungwort flowers. There are large clumps of grass I can’t yet identify, which looked out of place a few weeks ago but now seem less so as everything has grown around them. There are clumps of other things emerging, too – somewhere some of the 50 snake’s head fritillary bulbs I planted in autumn, along with what looks like alliums I must have missed when digging up the herbaceous plants. (They might look out of place in a native-ish wildflower meadow but I can always cut them for the vase.) There’s purple toadflax, which seeds itself in and provides leaves for the caterpillars of the toadflax brocade moth, along with nectar for dozens of bees, butterflies and moths. There are primroses, which haven’t quite done anything yet, and primulas, which must be somewhere. There are the first lush clumps of mountain cornflower, the first new leaves of evening primrose. There are strappy leaves of greater knapweed, splayed-out rosettes of shepherd’s purse. I’m pleased to find the wall bellflower, Campanula portenschlagiana, is finally growing in the wall – after four years of trying I had almost given up hope. The sweet rocket is putting on growth and should flower for the first time this year. Above it is a large gap in my side of next door’s hedge, where I’ve planted winter honeysuckle and ivy, in the hope that something might thrive there. Eventually, I would like them to outgrow the forsythia and Japanese spindle. Just a little bit. Just enough so they still provide support for the ivy to grow up.
When I moved the meadow from the back to the front, I planted things into the rain shadow of the hedge to see if anything would survive. I’ve been emptying the previous night’s hot-water bottle on to it daily for the last few weeks and my efforts are paying off – the ox-eye daisies are putting on growth, along with the red clover and some sowthistle that had self-seeded. That area will always be drier than the rest of the garden and I’m hoping I can work out which species will not fare so badly there. There’s plenty of room for other things to seed in if they want to, otherwise it can just become an additional habitat for mining bees, many of whom nest in dry, sparse soil.
We often forget, as gardeners, that every single thing in the garden has the potential to be a habitat, like the leaves that were blown into the pond, which provided a microhabitat for tiny new tadpoles that sit in them and eat algae from them. The rain shadow in the front garden, where plant growth is limited because the hedge stops rain falling beneath it, could therefore be celebrated as a habitat in its own right. Rather than trying to encourage things to grow, rather than emptying endless spent hot-water bottles on to it, perhaps I should leave it bare and see which invertebrates use the expanse of soil, which plants seed in that can cope with the dryness. There’s another mini habitat here, too, a little pile of stones and earth beneath the gas meter that mining bees might nest in or a frog might take shelter beneath. Along the far side, beneath the hedge, is a tiny wall where the render has started to come off, revealing a mass of bricks with no pointing. Perhaps hairy-footed flower bees nest here, and there will be other insects and spiders taking advantage of the sunny crannies, too. Literally everything is a habitat.
The pots along the front path are coming along well. The tiny strawberry tree that will never be a tree, the mint and oregano that will soon be ready to harvest. The agapanthus, the lavender. Everything is so full of promise.
In the back I steal an hour to do some gardening. There’s not much to do so I sweep the patio and pull up the remains of last year’s sweet peas, and put the table and chairs back out. I cut back fern leaves, beneath which new fists of growth are punching through the soil. I pull out crocosmia seedlings and sweep bay leaves off emerging primrose flowers. I transplant clumps of grass that have seeded into the border to some bald patches of lawn, and use a fork to scratch the remaining bald patches to sow seed into. Rain is due tomorrow so I’m hoping the combination of moist soil, mild temperatures and a dog that hates being wet might just encourage germination.
The pond has turned bright green with algae but I can’t do anything about it now there are tiny tadpoles. Besides, what do tadpoles eat? I hope nature will sort itself out and not let me down. I tickle the soil with my cultivator and wonder, still, who everyone is that is popping up to say hello. Little red buds, little green leaves. I scrape hedgehog poo off the feeding station and clean the bowl before refilling it with biscuits. Then the gulls start crying and I look up to see the drone flying low above the rooftops, scaring them off their nests.
I grab my phone and stand on the bench so I can get a better view, take a better video. The drone moves purposefully – starting at one end of the row of houses and working its way to the other end, stopping periodically at what I can only assume are gull nests. I watch it dip down and then rise again, move on to the next nest, dip down and then rise again. I can see that, despite wanting to stop gulls nesting only on his roof, Drone Bastard is also disturbing the gulls on the roofs of nearby houses. Gulls that Lin and Lorna have told me nest there every year and have names. Gulls that are part of the fabric of this neighbourhood. Gulls that belong here. I make a few videos and then text the Gulls Allowed group, who tell me he’s had the drone out five times today. Is there no law that will stop him?
Another visit to Dad and Ceals and I’m thinking of curlews. I have Tosca with me this time. She gets me up at 5.30 a.m. and we head out into the dawn, crossing the road to the path that will lead us on to the marshes.
It takes ages to get off Dad’s estate. Tosca is beside herself with excitement – she hasn’t been here before and every bit of grass, every lamp post, every boring-looking piece of pavement is a new world of things to sniff.
‘But curlews!’ I say. ‘Come on, you’ll have all the sniffies of the most wondrous things you never dreamed existed, in just a few minutes!’
‘But this bit of manky puddle,’ she says. ‘This old leaf.’
I let her off the lead so she can sniff to her heart’s desire while I make my way to the path – she can catch me up when she’s ready. She’s soon at my heels again. ‘Sorted?’ She huffs. We cross the empty road to the path. Tosca stops to sniff the broom, the bracken, the soil, and then catches me up in great, leaping gambols. She is a sausage.
The dawn gives way to a beautiful spring morning. There’s a big yellow ball rising into a cloudless blue sky and only a whisper of wind. The dawn chorus has shifted a gear and I can hear great tits and chaffinches, blackbirds and wrens. It’s been a long time coming, this spring. There’s no hint of the marshes yet; the path is surrounded on either side by heathland. There are posters warning of adders but it’s too early in the day to worry about them biting an excited dog’s nose, and besides, despite her excitement, she knows to stick to the path. I think of all the things she might be smelling now. What do weasels and stoats smell like? What do adders smell like? Can she smell hares or hedgehogs or badgers? She can’t contain herself. She’s running around in circles, from one smell to the next, pausing only to catch up with me. Her face tells me everything I need to know: that this path is the most exciting path EVER, that these bushes and bracken are FULL OF ALL THE SMELLS. But then it ends. Just as suddenly as crossing the road from Dad’s estate on to the heathy path, we leave the bracken and broom and my boots sink into mud – the outskirts of the marshes. We briefly join a clay, puddly bridle path that leads to a metal kissing gate that opens on to the estuary, and as I click open the latch I hear a bubbling overhead. A curlew!
It’s the only curlew I hear this morning, a brief call as it comes to land or takes off. We’re entering their breeding season and I wonder if they breed here as well as overwinter, or if they move on to somewhere else.
