Frog from 2025

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, as you’ll know from yesterday’s post, the frogs are back in the pond and the first frogspawn has appeared. Every year since we put  the pond in in 2010 this little miracle has occurred, and it makes me so happy! In her piece in Nature’s Calendar, Lulah Ellender describes some of the feats that frogs need to perform in order to breed, and very impressive they are too.

As I’ve described before, many frogs hibernate at the bottom of my pond – in my experience it’s mostly the males who do this, so that they’re ready when the females return from further afield. Earlier this week, a lovely neighbour asked if I could help with a frog that had turned up in her (currently pondless) garden. This looks like a very pregnant female to me. By the time I arrived, she’d popped under the fence to the garden next door, which has a recently-installed pond. It will be interesting to see if she stays there or heads back towards my pond – every pond has a distinctive smell caused by the glycolic acid in the algae, which acts as a ‘beacon’ for the frogs to return home.

I’d often wondered how frogs (and toads) survived under water during the winter. Frogs can absorb oxygen through their skin, but also drink via ‘drinking patches’ on their thighs and abdomen which absorb water. Ellender reports that while doing a sonar survey of Loch Ness, researchers found a toad cheerfully walking along the bottom of the loch, nearly 100 metres below the surface.

Sadly I’ve never had toads in my garden, but I always keep my fingers crossed. They can make journeys of up to thirty miles to return  to their natal ponds, and it’s estimated that a quarter of a million toads are squished on the roads en route. Hats off to the local people in many towns and villages who form ‘toad patrols’ and move the toads across the road.

Frogs tend to hibernate much closer to home (sensible creatures) and I’ve reported before how they arrive at the pond, look at the eager little faces of the males, who are all croaking their heads off, and then finally take the plunge. If the female is lucky, and isn’t drowned by all the enthusiastic males, she can lay up to four thousand eggs in one season, only a tiny proportion of which will survive. Everything seems to love a frogspawn breakfast, from the pond skaters who puncture the eggs to the dragonfly larvae who will also snare a tadpole, to the ducks who used to visit the community garden where I worked in Islington and eat it all up with apparent gusto. Somehow, some eggs survive, and will hatch in about three to four weeks. It takes about fourteen weeks for the frogs to turn into froglets, and on a wet day the garden can be alive with frogs the size of my fingernail, pinging in all directions.

Froglet on the move…

Ellender also mentions frog (or more specifically, toad) toxins in her piece. The glands behind the ears of a toad contain a toxin, which is hallucinogenic, and which can stop a human’s heart. No wonder that they are an active ingredient in fairy tale witches’ cauldrons – throwing a poor toad into boiling water would definitely cause the toxins to leach out and make a potentially damaging brew. Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, women with knowledge of herbs and animals came under suspicion as witches, particularly if they were thought to have a close relationship with animals such as black cats, bats or toads. In 1582, a woman suspected of being a ‘witch’ had two toad ‘familiars’ called Tom and Robbyn. I could go on for hours about the fear that the male establishment had of women and women’s knowledge, but suffice it to say that there were 60,000 documented cases of people being executed as witches, the vast majority of them older women who were seen as acting ‘outside of social norms’. When we think about ‘kissing a frog’, many women might be better off if the animal stays as an amphibian rather than turning into a ‘handsome prince’.

A plethora of eager male frogs

It really cheers me up that more people are putting ponds/other water sources into their gardens. I have never for one second regretted giving up my lawn for my pond (though to be fair I’m unlikely to be playing football in the garden any time soon) – the pond has been a constant source of delight from a few days after it was created, when I heard a ‘splosh’ and the first frog turned up. If you have space, I would highly recommend it, even if it’s just a bowl sunk into the ground. You never know who or what is going to turn up!