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/

wriggling and hopping

 

Wriggling cheerfulness

celebrating amphibians

Toadspawn

A string of pearls

Dark necklace for green weeds

A gift of wriggling cheerfulness

With hops

How do you celebrate your amphibians?

(What do you mean, you don’t?) 

See yesterday's Singing on the Toad Bus 

This spawning season is always a good time to encourage people to reflect….frogs and toads are often among people’s first natural history memories: the (often ill-fated) tadpoles in a jar or tank or bowl at home or at school, the excitement of froglets hopping out into the world, the sheer wonder of those lifecycles. These spring days are times when people feel they can help: buckets, wellies and good will; a careful attending to the garden pond, making sure the local wild ponds are clear of debris. The summer horrors of lawnmowers and froglet migrations are another time to step in and be supportive (let the grass grow for a week or two)

If you are a dog walker, this is also a good time to please keep dogs out of the ponds. Just as you keep dogs under tight control where there are ground-nesting birds, on these precious days around spawning, think of your dog as a hairy foodmixer who’s just been switched on in the pond. It is also worth thinking about what tick treatments you use if you have a water-loving dogs. External, topical, treatments wash off in ponds  (=repeated treatment needed = more money + more risk for your dog) and can have grim consequences for pond-based invertebrates( as numbers of swimming dogs increases so does the pesticide level in the water….work it out yourself). Systemic tick treatments are much better – less destructive and needing less repeats!

And enjoy your pond!

Here is one “enjoyable pond” moment from local writer Mark Johnson

THE TOADS AT LIGHTWOOD

The toads came today 

In the same place 

And in the same way

They always do

Not quite

Two by two

But in a line

Crooked yet true

We always say 

They’ll be here next year

The sun will shine

And the sky will be clear

But the day may come

When they don’t appear

I know that thought

Is your greatest fear 

But as long as, Gordon

You are here 

As long as we fight

To save what’s dear

The toads will return

With their amphibian swing

Lightwood will croak 

Each and every spring

If you have  some amphibian moment to share (froglifers? Toad Patrollers?) do send them through and if I can, I’ll share them here! (creepingtoad@btinternet.com)

Over the years, this blog has featured lots of amphibian-centred posts. This link will take you to some of the pieces that came in for the Telling Toads initiative

With many thanks to:

• Mark for his poem
• Phots: all c/o G MacLellan

Singing on the Toad Bus

Toads, spawn and hope

migrations, obstacles and being a Toad-walker

The pond-spawning season has run a bit odd this year

The frogs arrived pretty much as usual in late February but have kept turning up since, so that now, in April, the first hatching of tadpoles are wriggling in the shallows on the disintegrating masses of their spawn while late arrivals, caught short by the weather and a wall are still dumping spawn in puddles and in one instance this morning on a stretch of sticky mud*

The toads started late, a week, two, later than usual but when that spring-gun finally sounded were heading for the ponds with some determination. A few warm days helped and the culvert wall which is our disaster movie site provided its usual obstacle. That’s where a cheerful group of Toad-walkers come in, taking time each morning to wade along the stream below the wall and pick up weary clamberers.

There is a lovely toad-full hillside of trees and heather, you see. There are boggy bits and squelchy corners and excellent crags for hiding in and under but when the call to the ponds comes and the toads wake from hibernation and head for the pools, they come up against a wall. It looks like a nice wall: mossy, crumbly, full of holes and nooks. All very well until you are a small toad with a 1.5 metre wall to scale and many don’t make it. They try and keep trying, until there is no “try” left and we find them dead in the puddles below the old stone. The Toad Bus brings some relief (We’re going on the Toad Bus, the Toad Bus the Toad Bus….runs the song, what do you mean, you've never heard it?**)

It also provides a measure of what is happening in the general migrations to these pools. Nestled in the floors of a beautiful valley, they attract toads from all around the area and most can arrive without too many incidents. 

There’ll be singing on the Toad-bus, the Toad-bus, the Toad-bus,

There’ll be singing on the Toad-bus, all the way to the pond**

This year, Toad-walkers weren’t needed until the very end of March. There were three mornings then of increasing numbers: 70, 86, 264……Then the temperature dropped again and for the last 4 days numbers have plummeted. Just 4 this morning. Has the migration finished? Did that 264 day mark the turning point? Probably not. Usually there is a week of movement, with 3 or 4 days of those treble figure bucketfuls. 

There’s a Toad in my Bucket, dear Jenny, dear Jenny, 

There’s a toad in my bucket, dear Jenny, a Toad. 

Then find it a friend, dear Toadman, dear Toadman, 

Find it a friend, dear Toadman, 

A friend!***

So what now? The cold weather is forecast to last for a few more days? Will this end the migration? Will it start again if the spring sun warms the earth enough? Will all those unspawned toads just shrug their amphibian shoulders and head off into the moss for a bit of ant-eating? Do egg-full females, give up for a year? Do they try again? Or, egg-bound, do they fade away and die

We’ll have to see

Because now: the first frogspawn has hatched. There is toadspawn lacing the pond-weeds with chains. Those first toads who filled the ponds with song and spawn, have done their bit and headed back to the foraging fields….

A mixed-up spring so far. But Toad-walking brings us into lots of conversations: interested adults, excited children, supportive dogs: and appreciation; no-one saying “rather you than me”, no-one doing the “oooo, slimy things” bit; a few slightly confusing “I think it’s lovely the way they carry their children to the pond on their backs”. But conversation. Time to listen to tales of garden ponds, of frogs helped and toads lifted on their own walks. Of lizards: first sightings this spring. Of how lovely it is to hear the curlews and are the ravens nesting yet. To be Nature’s appreciative ear and to acknowledge delight

I’m a Toad-walker, the driver of a Toad Bus and I love the smiles it brings…..

If you have your own toad inspirations, please share them with me: email me at creepingtoad@btinternet.com, or find me on facebook: @creepingtoad

If you'd like to do your own bit to help your local toads, visit the Toad Patrol pages on Froglife's website

Froglife also has a Q&A page that for garden pond issues and other question

And if you'd like to share the wonders of your local pond you can file records of who lives there (grandparents and annoying younger siblings aren't really what we're looking for) using the Dragonfinder app or find out more and become involved in monitoring a local pond through People, Ponds & Water project with the Freshwater Habitats Trust

Finally, look for out for Save The Frogs Day on Saturday 24th April, 2021

*The ponds in this account are in Buxton, in a wonderful corner of northern Derbyshire. I won’t give precise locations to respect their privacy a bit. No paparazzi please

** Improvise to suit....

***You will have gathered there is a whole selection of Supportive Songs for Distressed Toads. In this fine example, the jenny referred to is Jenny Greenteeth, magnificent spirit of pondweed and waterways from Lancashire...and the Toadman? - take a peek at the link to a very short film 

Photos:

Photos here are by G MacLellan apart from that final toadlet, c/o I MacLellan

Save the Frogs Day!

Save the Frogs Day

event in Buxton

"Come, hop into the garden, Maud"

Sunday 26th April*

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

1.30 – 3.30

SORRY EVERYONE BUT THIS EVENT IS CANCELLED. BUXTON MUSEUM IS CLOSED AND ALL EVENTS ARE CANCELLED - WE DON'T KNOW HOW LONG FOR
I'M LEAVING THE CONTENT OF THE BLOG UP AS THE POINTS IT MAKES STILL STAND. FOR THIS AND OTHER CREEPING TOAD EVENTS DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS, I'LL POST A SIMILAR ACTIVITY ON LINE AT THE TIME WHEN WE WOULD HAVE DONE THE ACTIVITY - SPO KEEP AN EYE ON THIS BLOG FOR THINGS TO DO!

part of an international weekend of action on behalf of amphibians everywhere. Using information about fabulous frogs from around the world, draw your own giant frog or make a model pond to hang on your wall complete with tiny tadpole puppets! Or crocodiles - even though they're reptiles....
(*most events are taking place on Saturday 25th but our frogs are waking a bit later....) 

Find us: we'll be at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, Terrace Rd, Buxton, Derbyshire, SK17 6DA. follow the link for more information and directions
Details: this event is free (any donations will be hopped over to Save the Frogs)
Materials and vaguely artistic direction supplied
Tickets: no booking or tickets needed, just drop by and join in. Give yourself at least 30 minutes to make or draw something

Leptopelis, Malawi

From purple frogs to palm frogs, tinker frogs to sharp-snouted day frogs, ghost frogs, painted frogs, redbelly egg frogs, frogs are in danger across the world (not to mention toads, newts, salamanders and caecilians). Amphibians are important. They are the hunters of the slugs who eat your lettuces and the beetles that nibble your lilies. Their tadpoles feed just about everything else in the ponds where they live. More than that, they are delicate barometers of the state of an ecosystem: amphibian populations respond to water quality, air quality, even soil pollutions quickly and the health of their populations can be a call for help

Save the Frogs is an international campaign promoting greater understanding of amphibians. With projects ranging from Ghana to Nepal to Argentina, their work spreads a deeper appreciation of these wonderful creatures.

Save the Frogs Day in UK sets out to raise awareness of our resident amphibians and the delights they offer and the threats they face and give visitors to an event the chance to find out a bit more about some of the fascinating amphibians in other part so the world….

Common Frog on North Uist

At our Save the Frogs Day event in Buxton, we’ll have information about some of those strangely exotic amphibians from around the world (how can you not be fascinated by a Togo Slippery Frog or a Bornean Flat-headed Frog?), someone to talk to (mostly me: as Creeping Toad I am also a zoologist, a trustee for Froglife and a bit of an amphibian obsessive) and things to make and do: inspired by a frog you might like to draw one as big as you are. Or exercise your construction skills and make a pond of folded card and glue, with recycled plastic water ad plants and maybe the questing toes of a paddling child dipping into the “water” from above…..

This event is also part of the Celebration:Earth! project: encouraging people to stop, feel, think and reflect about the world around them: what have you done that you are proud of to help the Earth, what would you like to do next? Who could help you do that?

Useful links:

Save the Frogs:

Celebration:Earth! 

Froglife

Edge

Artists:

main painting: c/o the wonderful Ruth Evans

Small Leptopelis: me from about 30 years ago!

North Uist frog: me

Toad's eye: Kenny Taylor

Water lilies: me 

Lizard's flicker, snake's slide

Puddocks and cruddles

Froglife and Creeping Toad part 2

Lizards flicker, snakes slide and crocodiles lie like old memories on riverbanks.  Frogs hop and toads may creep; a newt can hang suspended in a pool but few can ever compare with the enigmatic smile of an axolotl. Enjoy the wonder of a cold-blooded world!

a friendly frog from North Uist

Try playing with words, on a quiet moment of today, list the names you know for amphibians and reptiles. Then shuffle them, play with them, rearrange and read them aloud. Enjoy language. Recite them to yr friends and alarm your colleagues….use whatever languages you like

Frog and toad and natterjack, 
Puddock, taddies and cruddles, 
Lesair agus nathair, cnadan agus liugair

Over the week 6 - 13th October, Creeping Toad posted (at least) 2 posts a day in  "social media takeover" for Froglife. The first few days' posts became the blog post The Blink of a Golden Eye, the rest have been amalgamated to become this entry. There is an underlying theme of the proximity of hibernation, trying to catch the sense of impending sleep and the call that draws reptiles and amphibians to the safety of cool, dark places....
Froglife twitter: @froglifers
Froglife facebook: Froglife

Globally, many frogs and toads need help. The charity Save the Frogs campaigns internationally, supporting projects around habitat conservation and community education. Saturday April 25th 2020, will be the 12th Save the Frogs day.

Leptopelis from Malawi

"Conceived and coordinated by SAVE THE FROGS!, Save The Frogs Day is the world's largest day of amphibian education and conservation action. Our goal is to provide frog enthusiasts with educational materials, ideas and inspiration and empower them to educate their local communities about amphibians. Since 2009, SAVE THE FROGS! staff and volunteers have conducted over 1,400 educational Save The Frogs Day events in at least 56 countries around the world."
(Quote from the Save the Frogs website)

There will be a Creeping Toad StF Day event in Buxton. Plans are still dreaming with the hibernating toads: thoughts are wriggling around small sculptural landscape lanterns or huge pictures where people can draw themselves into a landscape on the same scale as a frog. Why don’t you join in and celebrate the wonderful world of anurans? What you do doesn’t need to be big or wild or ground-breaking. How about a tea-party of frog-shaped cakes? Those terrible rock-cakes your friend makes could easily become cheerfullly lumpy toads! How about a cake iced blue as a pond with marzipan water lilies and silver bauble frogspawn?

But to return to the dream of toads…

After the sleep, did you creep?
Did you hop? Cross a road with hope?
Did you swim? Did you stop?
Did you wait in the pond for the lover who never came?
What does it portend when the water is no longer your friend?
Ponds need care, need tending, need love for the frogs to thrive. And then they will use the ditch by the road!

But now….

The cold calls us now to sleep, folding limbs, closing eyes, toad folds into mud. A long slow silence in the dark and the damp. Winter dreaming is the home that holds us through the centuries. Shadowy peace in the echoing silence….

Photos: all these ones are by me, c G MacLellan

The blink of a golden eye

The blink of a golden eye

Froglife and Creeping Toad

Aha! This week, with a toadly creep and occasional froggy hops, Creeping Toad is taking over the Froglife twitter and facebook platforms. The aim is to add a different flavour to the regular Froglife posts and give their regular followers something perhaps a little unexpected to meet. For my regular followers, we hope that connecting to Froglife might bring you into a whole hoppy world of cool damp skin and the dry scales of reptilian cousins….

Because Twitter posts have to be so short and I’m a storyteller with a tendency to ramble, posting is an interesting execrise in shutting up but here I thought I would string those first posts together in their full form as a journey towards hibernation.

The season changes, autumn comes with witner a cloud on a horizon of blowing leaves

The summer is behind her. A spring of swarming waters and wriggling company, a season of damp grass and clambering, the slow learning of dangers and dinners and now a chill on the edge of awareness.

Watch as you garden for the summer’s small survivors: nature takes so many young amphibians, try not to add to the tally.

The darkness calls to froglet, toadlet and matriarch alike, an invitation to sink into ancient dreams, memories drifting down through centuries, through millennia of amphibian feet pressing into soft earth, clasping branches, the chance to step into the long slow sleep that remembers giant dragonflies, tree ferns and the shock  of those first steps onto dry sand

A pile of sticks might be enough. Dead leaves, logs or rocks, a heap and a half, holes and sheter and small tight squeeze points. Our amphibians are heading for hibernation places now. Try taking a look at your garden or the wild place at the end of the street: is there a corner that could be left? A haven for the sleepy? Undisturbed the winter through, a sanctuary to sleep for spring….



Before the winter comes at last, pause. The pond mirrors trees, reflects us, the toad’s eyes mirror other depths, a shimmer of gold, the dream of a damp world, an invitation to see the world at toad height or frog level.

Photographs
All c/o me apart from the final image c/o Kenny Taylor

Links
Froglife is an obvious link but you might also enjoy We Are The Ark with their advice on turning any space you can find into a sanctuary.....

Frogs rock in purple socks

A summer for frogs

A new Telling Toads poem

or maybe a song....

How has you summer gone? For our amphibian friends it has been a season of mixed fortunes with an early spring and sudden stretches of almost to hot days. We are still waiting for this summer’s numbers but you might like to know that last year, Froglife’s bold Toads on Roads patrols, helped 98,483 toads at 165 different crossing points.

Find out more by following the link. Be inspired! Be a toad-hero!

Or become a frog-friend. You might dig a pond. You might enocureage a bit of long grass, a pile of old wood, a cheerfully dmap corner ina garden or park. Or you might try following the following advice

The Frog Rap!

Have you sat in the shade?

In the leafy glade

Beside the pool

Where it’s nice and cool

And the frog rocks

In his purple socks

On his lily pad stage

Have you sat in the shade?       

                         

Cos I have!

I’ve sat in the shade

In a leafy glade

Beside the pool

Where it’s nice and cool

And I’ve rocked

With the frog

In his purple socks

But I wore yellow!

Jan Hedger

Thanks to Jan for this contribution to our Telling Toads collection and to Marilyn Dougan for the image. The Frog Rap really needs to be spoken out loud, so why not alarm the people next to you by cheerfully reciting this lovely little poem. I feel there should be a dance that goes with it..... Telling Toads sets out to gather new poems and stories celebrating amphibians and reptilesWhy not have a look at the notes about what we are looking for and unleash your inner frogliness across a page or screen…..find out more, here

Photos: c/o G MacLellan

 Watch out for the week at the start of October 

when Creeping Toad takes over the Froglife Twitter Feed for a week

Beneath the surface....issues among tadpoles

Beneath the surface

a tadpole's life is not always a happy one....

latest Telling Toads contributions

Life in a toad pond or a frog pool is not always easy. Even getting there after a winter of deep dreams in a cold rocky hollow is fraught with peril (and if you humans would ike to help, look for a local
Toad Crossing team, or check out Froglife’s “Toads  on Roads” page). As tadpoles grow, in a warm wet summer, a pond may be a good place to be but if there is too muhc sun and too little rain and the water begins to go…..Natterjacks in their rainwater hollows on heaths and dunes aim to grow fast and start hopping soon: their water is supply is precarious. Our amphibians don’t have those magnificent African Bullfrogs Dads who guard their squirming tadpole swarms (they have even been known to make lions back off, more, i suspect, from confusion than from fear) and who will dig channels from a drying puddle of ‘poles into the deeper, if more precarious, waters of a bigger pool. Our amphibians have to sit there and sing for the rain....

And all that is a longer introduction to the next two Telling Toads contributions…..its summer, I hope you get a chance to sit around somewhere enjoying the season…why not put pen to paper, pencil to note or finger to keypad and send us your own toady contribution….don’t know where to start? See the suggestions that are coming in on the Whispers pages. To read more of our Telling Toads pieces simply search this blog for Telling Toads!

Toads 
Susannah Violette
All sizes they bloat their night-bodies.
With their bulimic tongues, belch
their language of tadpole begetting,
of water seeking,
of climbing damp belly
to warty back
and thrusting
whilst asking:
Is this our puddle?
Am I home yet?

999 Tadpoles
Rosemary McLeish
I can't tell you how awful it is in this pond.
It's a heaving, seething, struggling, lumpy
milk pudding of a mud-hole.
I am surrounded by brothers. 
All they do all day is push and shove, making
more room for themselves. I sit tight
in my tiny space ignoring their jostling.
I keep myself small.

Somebody prods us with a stick.
Alarm stirs the pool into a whirling chaos of
brothers fighting to get out.
A lot of casualties.
At least the gruel thins.

Some of the brothers are growing legs.
They're eating the little ones.
But there still isn't room enough and now
they can kick, not just squirm.
They leave me alone, I don't know why,
so I can swim around a little, stretch.
Some great bird swoops down every day,
scoops up a beakful of us -
you can see them kicking as he glugs them down his throat.
He never comes near me.

Now we're all getting bigger, some are taking off,
jumping out of the pond, disappearing into the long grass.
The water in the pond is clearing,
brightening.
I can tell apart the ones with boring brown blotches now,
some long and thin,
some chubby, some tough and mean,
some cheery and silly.
Still fighting from time to time.
Some days I think it must be the weather.

I begged them to stop but they cold-shouldered me,
preferring fights to rational discourse.
I asked why they didn't like me,
but they looked at me as if I'd crawled out from under a stone.
Once in a while they suspend hostilities, all join
together to raise their voices in harmony to greet the dawn.
It gets on my nerves.
I tried to join them but they don't want to hear
my rusty burping voice, say I can't sing their tune.

They've all gone now. Left me behind.
I've got the whole pond to myself..
Nobody croaking, nobody quarrelling.
I can swim from one end to the other
and across from side to side.

At first it was just what I'd wanted.
The space to breathe,
so still and quiet I could think my own thoughts.
As much food as I could eat.
But gradually I began to miss them.
All that pushing and shoving, something happening
all the time.
Now it's just me and the pond and the weather,
it gets very boring. I'm lonely.
Wonder why they all left, why nobody ate me.
Wonder what's the matter with me.

The duckweed has been cleared,
so when the sun came out I saw myself reflected,
long and deep in the still water.
I looked over my shoulder,
nobody there but me.
No wonder they left me alone.
What a freak!
Yellow speckles, exopthalmic eyes, warty chin.
I should find a large broad leaf
to squat under.

I'm a toad, not a frog! 
But those are diamonds in my eyes.

Originally published in Artesian magazine in 2002, reprinted with poet’s permission

the perils of the deep

Thank you to today's poets, Susannah and Rosie and to Shaun Waters for the rising newt