Dear Readers, if I sneak out into the garden very quietly, and make sure that my shadow doesn’t fall on the pond, I can get a glimpse of the frogs waiting around in the pond. Apart from the occasional ‘gribbit’ from one of the males, everyone is pretty much stationery, as if cast in stone. Such patience! But what are they waiting for?

Beneath the surface of the pond, some of them will be hanging on to a female with their specially adapted thumbs, in a process known as amplexus. The males will ride around on the female, sometimes for days, until she decides to release her eggs. At that point the male will release his sperm and the eggs will be fertilised. This is the whole reason for those days of being carried around by the (much larger) female – while he’s in situ no other male will get a chance to mate, unless a bigger male comes along and boots him off. This explains those situations you sometimes see where one female has numerous males attached to her. No wonder the females are sometimes very circumspect about jumping in the water.

And here’s a really enormous female frog that was found on our road – the lovely lady who found her was worried about her, but I’m pretty sure she’s just gravid. She leapt into the pond within 2 minutes of seeing it. It’s interesting how varied frogs are in colour – the frogs in the garden can be any colour from nearly black to palest yellow, and everything inbetween.

The patient males don’t all have mates yet, so some of them will be waiting to see if a female happens along. Every year the males come out of hibernation at the bottom of the pond first, and then the females, who usually hibernate elsewhere, wander along and sometimes sit on the edge of the pond for a bit as if weighing up their options before taking the plunge.

I’ve had this pond for fifteen years now, and it’s always so unpredictable – some years the weather stays warm and it’s a bumper year, other years (like this oneI it drops twenty degrees, sometimes overnight. Fingers crossed that the pond doesn’t freeze – the frogs can cope with anything else. And soon there will be tadpoles, and spring will really be here.