The Common Frog

Ponds, with their unique environment have attracted me to their banks for as long as I can remember and as I ambled down the road towards the sawmill in the castle grounds last week, memories of my old haunts returned.
Within a radius of about three miles from where I spent my formative years were six ponds, each different and hosting a vast array of wildlife.

My first Mallard Duck’s nest was found at one, on the ground, hidden under a thick canopy of bushes and although it may seem strange to some people, I still recall the smell of the eggs and the downy-feathered nest.

Another, situated in the middle of a field was guarded by a farmer who would rudely interrupt as I searched for waterhen and coots nests by cursing loudly and waving a stick in the air above his head. On one occasion, he changed tactics and sneaked up on me quietly as I studied a crow’s nest at the top of a large hawthorn bush. His demands that I return to the ground immediately were politely ignored and as he left to alert the local bobby, I made my escape.

In March however, all the ponds would have one thing in common, they would be full of frogs and their spawn.

The initial sign that this event was imminent was not pleasant, for many of the adults were killed on the road as they made the annual pilgrimage to their breeding ponds where any surviving females would lay their eggs in mass. These of course were irresistible to a boy, and my mother, wakened by the loud croaking, would often send me back to the pond with the bucket of spawn and frogs I had collected.

Earlier this year my own son had found a large puddle in the garden that one pair of frogs at least had mistaken for a pond and when tadpoles appeared in the hundreds, junior removed a few and placed them in a small plastic tank. The tank already held the larva of a diving beetle (Dytiscus) he had captured in the stream at the front of the house, a ferocious predator that unknown to him would soon devour his recently acquired pet “taddies”. My hopes of photographing Dytiscus were dashed after my son and heir noticed the dwindling number of tadpoles, discovered the cause and duly dispatched it with a sharp stick.

The tadpoles in the garden were not fairing much better as the resident male blackbird, intrigued by their wriggling on the surface, had found them more tasty than my raspberries and although I did not wish to see the tadpoles completely exterminated, a jar or two of jam was now a possibility. Back at the pond beside the sawmill a large dragonfly flew overhead and circled a few times before landing to rest on a bush close by

As I moved closer to investigate, a movement on the ground caught my attention. Many young frogs having left the water were making their way from the pond. It would be two years before these youngsters matured sexually but their parents if they survived the onslaught of a number of predators including herons, ducks, hedgehogs and cats would return the following spring to breed.

As I made my way back along the road to Marybank lodge, the absence of traffic made me realise that the carnage I witnessed on the road each spring as a boy was highly unlikely to occur here.