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

Dreams of lost toads

 Lost Toads

Remembrance Day for Lost Species, 2020

It was cold. I sat and thought about the toads I know and love, of toads that have gone: the beautiful Golden Toad (Incilius periglenes, last seen 1989) of central America, of frogs so imperilled there may be only 1 or 2 individuals left (Hula painted Frog, Discoglossus nigriventer), of Mountain Chickens, (Leptodactylus fallax) wonderful, delightful and with their diminishing populations now being ravaged by chytrid fungus infections*

It was cold. I thought about what I already do, what could I do more of? What projects I could support, where a pair of wellies, a bucket and willing hands and might help

It was cold. I found my own stillness and thought of hibernation, of damp, patient lovelinesses folded into a deep, dreaming (?), sleep. Do toads dream? Who knows? But they have an ancient lineage to dream about

This was my Remembrance Day for Lost Species evening. A group of us had been planning a Creative Day to mark the occasion: gathering in the hills here to talk and draw and paint and plan. But no. Instead, I was here, human alone but in good amphibian company and it was cold. So I gathered so amphibians from the shelves, spread out some sheets of black paper, grabbed a handful of oil pastels, pens and scraps of paper and started to doodle

A HEART FULL OF TOADS

Sleeping.

Hiding the jewels of our eyes,

In the gravelled mud of our skins.

Sleeping,

A long slow slumber in the welcoming dark.

Sleeping, 

Still as stone, still as death,

Still as the shadows we are wrapped in.

Sleeping,

To dream of passion and ponds and

Spawn in a Toad Queen’s necklace in the weed.

And you, traveller in a toad’s dream,

What do you bring to the lost people

Of the hills?

I will rest beside you,

I will stand between you and harm,

I will sing your wonders to an unheeding world.

And come the spring when you wake,

And this world contrives to trap you,

Contain you, confine you, restrain you,

Hinder you, thwart you,

Block the pull of the home pond

With walls, with channels, with concrete and hostility

I will be and

I will rally,

The hands that lift,

The boots that wade,

The buckets that carry,

The hearts that smile,

And help you to the bliss,

Of the cold, dark water,

And the family that thrills,

Raising wonder to the skies.

For Toad is always there,

Inside me, beside me.

Connection,

Comfort, Inspiration,

Companion.

Cousin.

A bit of background

Remembrance Day for Lost Species, November 30th, is a chance each year to explore the stories of extinct and critically endangered species, cultures, lifeways, and ecological communities. 

Whilst emphasising that these losses are rooted in violent and discriminatory governing practices, the day provides an opportunity for participants to make or renew commitments to all who remain, and to develop creative and practical solutions. 

Remembrance Day for Lost Species honours diverse experiences and practices associated with enduring and witnessing the loss of cultural and biological diversity. 

(Information from RDLS website)

Useful links

* Robin Moore: In Search of Lost Frogs, Bloomsbury, 2014 – a book for inspiration and sorrow

Action: visit FROGLIFE  for amphibian and reptile related conservation in UK

Immediate action: why not buy a friend or treat yourself to a copy of the Froglife Toad print (limited edition so get in quick!)

Toads On roads: add you feet, wellies, buckets and best wishes to the toads on Roads scheme

For amphibians there is also

Save the Frog Day

But RDLS reaches out without an amphibian emphasis (that is my personal stuff) so visi them for ideas and maybe look at  the Loving Earth Project and CelebrationEarth! for ideas (Loving) and people who will celebrate emotional and spiritual responses to nature as well as practical ones (CE!)

Images:

First three images: c G MacLellan

Magnificent footnote toad: C K Taylor

Toads? Really? Why?

A fascination of toads

"Why? Toads? I mean, Toads!"

a small toad crept through a forest of grass....

People often ask “so what is it with you and toads, anyway?”. Or words to that effect. My answers tend to wander partly because there are too many of them.

I might offer the childhood answer that draws from early, early memories (4 years old perhaps) and determinedly Going To The Pond and the ongoing excitement of heading home with a jar full of tadpoles. A simple excitement of tadpoles. Of their wriggling enthusiasm for life, their shape, their transformation. Then there are seasons of successes and failures before being confident about raising froglets and toadlets to release size….

That is all true.

So is the more scientific response. I’m a zoologist, an ecologist, and toads are fascinating. Their role within ecosystems is much subtler than just being steadfast predators who sit there and eat anything they can fit in their mouths. Their evolution is a success story of the underdog…they have crept, hopped, and slithered their way past dinosaurs and extinctions and ice ages. They have worked with their biologies so that, yes, most are bound to water and the spilling of spawn, but others can thrive in deserts, others can give birth to live young. They have explored ways of raising offspring that makes mammalian systems look positively unimaginative. Incubate eggs in your stomach. Embed eggs in a parent’s back. Wrap them in strings round your back legs and carry them. Stuff them into a pouch on your back. Lay them in a foam nest above the water the tadpoles will drop into. Lay them in a deep tunnel. Withhold them and let young salamanders slip out later. Or just explore toxicity in ways full of intrigue, hallucination and death. What amazing animals!

Then there is the response from my storyteller, folklorist side of enchanted frogs, of disenchanted

princes, of the Vietnamese Toad who confronted the Emperor of Heaven, gained rain and a voice to sing to the sky. There are toad charms for warts and jealousy and anger. There is the Toadman, the holder of the Horseman’s Word. There is Shakespeare, and woodcuts of witches’ familiars. There is the magic of the toadstone that sits inside a toad’s head (the rest of us just say, “look! The jewels in a toad’s head are those golden eyes that watch the world”).

All of those are also true.

There is a simple aesthetic reply. To me (at least), toads are beautiful. I love their lumpy shapes, their smiling faces. Those golden eyes. I love the lines of a frog and the precision of amphibian toes. The flickering flutter of a courting newt’s tail. Beautiful

Then there are deeper answers that don’t always make sense to other people and so are really the ones that matter most to me.

I am an animist. For me, the quality I call spirit is found throughout the world. We all sing in different voices but all sing with the same wonder. We are all connected, all related, both ecologically and spiritually. I have a toad totem. There is a connection between myself and toads (and other amphibians but toad most of all). There is a (metaphorical) toad who sits inside of me, whose presence completes me. Not because he/she/it provides qualities I lack particularly. Nor is it a connection based on calculated astrological balances and elemental wotsits. It isn’t that I have a Toad Guide or Higher Guardian Angelic Toad or something. It is simpler. Like deep friendships, it doesn’t really make sense. It just is. With toads, I am reminded of patience, of the value of just waiting, and watching, and judging the moment to strike. I am reminded of hidden treasures. Of the long stillness of winter dreaming. Of passion. All of which are things I know as a human, anyway, but maybe the toad-view adds a slightly different perspective. Totemic relationships don’t need to make sense to anyone else. They simply need to be.

I am a pagan animist. For me there are spirits who still walk this world and gods who watch and wait. And comment. And there is Grandmother Toad who is one of the Ancient Ones, who was here, waking underground, shaping herself into life from mud and gold when the trees dreamed of the First Forest and Raven’s wings beat the winds into life and woke all the world. Now, with the trees still dreaming of the First Forest, and Raven sweeping the sky with thunderwings, Grandmother Toad is one of the voices who speaks in the dark of the caves of our practice. She is Contemplation and Laughter and Compassion and the rock upon which you can break yourself. She watches. She smiles. She waits.

So, when I pick up a toad stranded in a ditch with nowhere to go, with a slow exhausted death after long hibernation ahead of it and an urgency calling it pondwards, all these answers move within me. I could try to explain it to you, standing there on the bank above me and asking “why are you doing that?” or I can just smile and invite you to pause, to look and recognise wonder in the little cousins who never give up.

Images

From the top:

Small toad: c Ian MacLellan

Toad's eye: c Kenny Taylor 

Newt: c Shaun Walters

all the others: c G MacLellan

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.....