Frogsong in February

 Frogsongs in February

A cold February afternoon and the ponds are, thankfully, silent. A watchful, but frogless, heron took off as I arrived. Friends have seen them taking frogs already this year - from ponds in those warmer garden microclimates "just down the road" but here in this hollow of the hills on the edge of town, the cold still holds them all, frogs, toads and newts, asleep. 

But it IS February and further south and lower down, the frogs have started moving, the Toadwatchers of the Toad Patrols are polishing their boots and filing road closure requests (and getting national headlines!). Here I just hope the cold holds for a few weeks more: too often in recent years, there is a flurry of early wakefulness, and a hasty spawning before March snow or late frosts interrupts everything....

But it IS February and there have been those mornings when I wake up and the world smells full of the promise of frogsong and jellied spawn....

FROGSONG

Gordon MacLellan 

It is March and

This morning held a cold smell of spring

Of frogsong and wonder.

Reflections of blue skies and

Willow trees are

Broken by the weeds that break

The pond’s mirror.

There is movement,

A small turning, splashing

Disturbance,

But there is no-one to see.

The wind across the water

Traces deceptive arrows

And by the far bank,

A bigger movement

Sends a ripple, a wave spreading outwards

But still there is no cause to see,

No culprit to celebrate.

 

The pool settles again,

And me, I rest

Here on the grass, watching.

It is March and

I am still hoping for frogs.

 

NOTES

Frogsong was published as "A Pond in March"in Froglife's Autumn/Winter 2-024 edition of Natterchat

Froglife organises the national Toads on Roads initiative: https://www.froglife.org/what-we-do/toads-on-roads/

storytellings, 2025

treasures to unpack, stories to unfold

Spring stories,

summer tales 2025

Stories in school and other excitements with Creeping Toad,

and ideas for public events!

 celebrating the richness of the changing year, here are stories, puppet-making story-building, pop-up landscapes and boxes of treasures. Outdoors or indoors, the natural world will give us stories and offer inspiration for child-led creativity!

Important dates:

World Book Day 6th March 2025- booked but other dates that week are available
On tour in northern Scotland:

• 18th - 27th March 2025
• 28th April - 9th May 2025 SOLD OUT

NEW TOUR DATES ADDED:

• 23rd - 30th June: Hereford and Worcester

 

other days, other dates, other places!

With stories spinning from the first signs of spring through earth giants and thunder-tigers to summer flowers, here are stories and activities to enchant and inspire.

Gordon MacLellan – Creeping Toad – is one of Britain’s leading environmental art and education workers. Take a look at the Toadblog: Creeping Toad

Drawing on 30 years of professional experience, Gordon’s work blends environmental experience with creativity. “Much of my work uses storytelling and story making but I also make small masks, giant masks, flags, lanterns, pop-up landscapes and create wild and wonderful occasions. We might work outdoors and take ideas from the world around us and our discoveries there. Indoors herds of model mammoths combine with boxes of treasures to give children material to work from”

A day’s visit to your school - or a public event in a library, museum, the park at the end of the road, might include:

storytelling performances: lasting up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time stories out of anything! outdoors or in, we'll use leaves and pine cones, twigs and stones and shells to inspire words, create poems and shape a set of stories never told before (allow 60 minutes for a class session)

NEW WORKSHOP: tools for writing

Taking natural objects, we'll build characters, use landscapes to describe journeys and reveal issues, problems or maybe terrible crimes. This workshop will give children ideas and tools for building stronger imagery into their writing and confidence to experiment and be adventurous with their writing. Most Creeping Toad sessions create stories but this is more focussed on literacy skills

puppets: we can make quick finger puppet animals or adventurers and create instant stories...or we might play with light, colour and shape and create an instant shadow puppet show or make rod and ribbon puppets to wander across a classroom....

from across lands and times: I can select stories to suit times and places: so we have had days of Native American stories, or Egyptian or Greek or Roman, there have been Chinese tales and African animal stories….lots of exciting resources to draw on here, to make new writing vibrant and lively. Castles are popular, too, with boxes of treasures to inspire a new adventure and release a bold princess or courageous dragon

story and book workshops: taking a bit longer (allow 90 minutes for a class) as well as discovering those stories no-one has ever heard before, now we will build those into the books that no-one has ever read before and leave the classroom with a library no-one has ever visited before!

long, low, meandering river pop-up

pop-up storyscapes: allow an hour for a class: gathering ideas, images and words we’ll make quick 3-d landscapes holding the essence of a story in a setting, key characters and the words that set the adventure running

tales of old Scotland: a collection of stories of Highland folklore and Scottish histories, of heroes and sorrows, bravery and the magics of sea, mountain and moor. These can be steered in various directions and we might listen to stories from Viking days or medieval and Stuart stories and even add some Scottish explorers and their adventures and disasters…

your own themes and ideas: or are you exploring a particular theme that you would like to involve some stories in? In recent projects, we have also made talking stone puppets, a giant eagle to hang from a classroom ceiling, prehistoric rockpools, a swarm of shadow dragons, pop-up castles

Charges: £280 a day (if you are a long way from my base in Buxton, Derbyshire, that price might need to increase a little
Fee includes storyteller’s fee, travel and materials. Can be paid on the day or I can invoice you.

Activities can be adapted to suit groups from P1 through to Secondary

For further information: visit the Creeping Toad website at

http://creepingtoad.blogspot.co.uk/

To book:

contact Gordon directly at

creepingtoad@btinternet.com

or by telephone: mobile: 07791 096857

slightly wild "prehistoric mouse"

Northern words and winter

 

snow on the Cairngorms, Nov 2024

Northern words and winter

 

extract from Wave Soaring

I feel very honoured that one of my poems has been included in the latest issue of Northwords Now (Winter 2024/25). NNow features "New writing, fresh from Scotland and the wider North (Sgrìobhadh ùr à Alba agus an Àird a Tuath)"

 

(So, yes: it includes work in English, Gaelic and Scots)

 

Copies are free and the printed copies can be found in bookshops, information centres, cafes and all sorts of places across the Highlands and Islands, or you can download a free copy from the website: 

https://www.northwordsnow.co.uk/Issue45

 

The cover image of Issue 45 is "Wave Soaring" by my lovely friend Alice V Taylor whose work can be seen here: 

https://www.instagram.com/alicev.taylor/?hl=en

 

As we are sort of in the cold now, the full text of "Now we are in the cold" follows. It is part of my latest collection, "Waiting for the Snow" and was first published in Issue 4 of Forget-me-Not Press (2022) "In The Dark":

https://forgetmenotpress.net/in-the-dark

 

Waiting for the Snow can be found on ebay or direct from me

 

 

Now We Are In the Cold. 

 

Now we are in the cold,

Now we are the hunting time,

And the wild geese fly in from the north of the world,

Stitching grey clouds to the hills below

With the long, wavering threads of their flight.

Winter waits,

For the silent, cautious deer,

For the birds to settle in the stubble,

For the hungry fox to take a chance.

 

Now we are in the cold,

Now we are in the hunting time,

And the stillness breathes

In the softest voice of the wind,

Whispering between the trunks, under the branches,

Among summer’s bones in the echoing wood.

Winter waits,

In the cracked ice,

In the wonder of an oak leaf, 

Frosted sharp on the bare ground

 

Now we are in the cold,

Now we are in the dark,

And we are hunted by the wildness,

And a bitter wind through the treetops,

And the cold, brittle silence of a snowy night.

And now, winter waits

For the sigh after the storm, 

For the single candle on the window sill

For my heart settling quiet beside a midnight hearth.

more snow on the Cairngorms, Nov 2024

Words and journals

 Where are Toadwords going?

Fossicking in the undergrowth of ideas 
and swapping stories with 

rooks and rats and midwinter wrens
....that's part of what writing is for me...

and music...working with Gifts from Crows

 

Adventures in print....the last couple of years have been lively for keyboards and scribbling pads (I usually write long-hand first, or at least cover an A3 sheet with notes!). I paused to look at where my writing had gone in these months. There are my new books: Waiting for the Snow and Baba Yaga: tales of an old witch that came out this year and Sacred Animals from last year. And then there are reviews, articles, poems and bits in all sorts of other publications....These pick up that Creeping Toad principle of looking creatively and emotionally at the world around us and explore past projects or unpack ideas and possibilities or are just delighted* wanders through the woods of imagination

 

Forget-me-Not Press: online art and poetry journal from Canada: I have work in Issues 4, 5, 6 and 7

Touchstone: the journal of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids

Faith Initiative: Issue 47 June 2023: the aim of the magazine is to open windows on the beliefs and practices of people of different faiths and cultures to foster understanding and reduce racially and religiously motivated violence. 

Homecoming: Aurochs 1, 2 (2023) and 3 (2024): journal of new animist writing

Primary Geography, Autumn 2024 the Geographical Association's journal for all Early Years and Primary Teachers and is published three times a year

Northern Earth, September 2024: exploring earth mysteries in Northern UK - and further afield

Pagan Dawn: the journal of the Pagan Federation

Magnet: 2024, an article on gardens as sanctuaries - both for humans and other-than-human people. Magnet seeks to nurture Christian faith in thoughtful, challenging ways, encouraging, enabling and equipping people of all faith traditions for life. 

Natterchat: the magazine of Froglife: I've hopped (and crept) into most of the latest issues

If you are associated with a publication and would like a Toad-piece, get in touch! Email is probably easiest: creepingtoad@btinternet.com

 

And there is music! a collaboration growing over the last year with the wonderful trio Gifts from Crows has grown into a release on bandcamp of "Whisper along the wind" combining Gift's music with my words and the beautiful images of Johanna Ronn

 

* delighted: at least I enjoy writing! hope other people enjoy the reading of it all!

Opening image: a white-faced owl who spent a day with me (recovering from flying into a window!) in Malawi in about 1984!

 

 

Lost Species Day, Buxton

 Lost Species Day

November 30th 2024

Free event in Buxton

We have lost many species of animals and plants over the last few hundred years. Some by human action, some in the more natural way of things, but we know that now our human activity is accelerating the loss

Monte Verde Golden Toad, Moroccan Bustard, Great Auk, Du Toit’s Torrent Frog, Galapagos Amaranth 

There is a lot we can do now as individuals, as communities and as a species ourselves, to slow those declines but this day and its events offer an opportunity to pause and reflect

Join us for a Lost Species Day event at the Green Man Gallery, Hardwick Studios, Hardwick Square South, Buxton, SK17 6PY

Times: 11:00 - 15:00

Follow on fb: https://fb.me/e/2ylY3MR7P

Steller’s Sea Cow, Levuana Moth, St Helena Heliotrope, Giant Fiji Ground Frog, Stubble Quail

Step out of busy lives and Saturday busy-ness and take to time to stop. Think about the plants and animals we have lost. Find your own resolution to act: on a domestic scale, a local scale or on engaging with something bigger. All sorts of action helps from planting bumblebee friendly window boxes to active membership of conservation, environmental or social justice organisations. Just talking about it all helps: keep the thought active, keep the conversation alive, pursue your local councillor down the street or wave a lost frog flag at your MP

Caribbean Monk Seal, Little Swan Island Hutia, Kalimantan Mango, Montane Hutia, Puerto Rica Hutia

But mostly, this day is a chance to take time to pause and reflect on why these animals and plants matter to you and which of the current ones you’ll champion.

In UK, Scottish and Welsh devolved governments have set up species champions where MSP and MS individuals take on campaigning on behalf of their chosen species…maybe you could be your own Species Champion

https://www.scotlink.org/link-campaigns/nature-champions/

https://waleslink.org/category/species-champions/

We’ll be inviting participants at our event to add the names of the species that feel most strongly connected to to our “determination list” and offering participants the chance to make their own memorial to those who have gone - or to create their own little Determined Shrine for those species they will champion

• We’ll be making triptych Icons and Nichos like the ones illustrating this post
• This is a free event and materials are provided
• Just come along for an hour or so and join in
• The Green Man Gallery Christmas exhibition will be on then as well so lots of lovely things of all prices will be available

Jamaican Wood Rail, Parana Pine, St Kilda House Mouse, North Island Little Spotted Kiwi, Aurora Frog, McPhee’s Shrew Tenrec, Rodrigues Solitaire, Dodo

Banner on the first paragraph features images from the 

Extinction Files by Ruth Evans: find  out more HERE