Frog Spring (2)

This year the water might become a slurry of waving tadpole tails and nibbling mouths, stripping the pond sides of algae. They’re starting towards their metamorphosis, which initially I felt myself over-familiar with from books and lessons. It was only when watching for changes in “her” frogs that I could show my daughter that I could think myself back into amazement that each “fish” should become a walking animal, and that its ancestors have been doing something similar since “before the dinosaurs” – since vertebrates first made landfall.

Another regular surprise is the appearance of toad tadpoles among the frog ones (we call them toadpoles). Toadpoles are bigger, larger, greener, and speckled with gold. Their eyes are visible on the sides of their heads and their mouths seem almost large enough to swallow one of their frog contemporaries. Toads may have done for Seamus Heaney as a naturalist (and I’ll not discuss Larkin) but these thick-bodied hatchlings keep me fascinated.

We do see adult toads in our garden, but rarely. One I remember crawling away with what an anthropomorphist would not hesitate to call an air of dudgeon when I moved the flowerpot it was resting under. When they lay their eggs in our pond, they do so out of sight, and we can’t see the strings of eggs they leave, so we never know when or if their tadpoles will emerge. For all their massiveness, they seem to appear from nothing.

As spring drips into summer the bulbous heads pressed against the pond liner seem unaware of the changes in the rest of their bodies. They glisten as they eat, and the back legs that emerge first hang like useless undercarriages. The toadpoles break the surface in the centre of the pond, and the frog ones turn on their backs and appear to chew at the underside of the water tension. When there are many doing this there’s a sound as of fine tissue paper crinkling.

Then the front legs come, and minute, tailed frogs zip across the water, or come to a stop in the middle of a lily pad. This is a sign that soon caution will be needed when walking outside.

In July, long after the spring’s toad march, a reverse procession starts. It’s strange but captivating. Of the times I’ve seen it, one warm, half-moist night stays most firmly in my mind. To get back home in those days, I sometimes crossed a vicarage’s gravel drive, which leads out to where the cycle track begins.

The air was moving slightly and softly, feeling like a drape of spider silk on my face and arms. Trees rose in blue-black silhouettes against the sky tinted by streetlights’ grapefruit colour. The white stones of the driveway were dyed almost the same – except that they were flickering like an ill-screwed bulb. I knew what this must mean, and crouched to take a look.

A stream of infant toads was making its way from a patch of shrubbery into the dark around the church. Each one was a perfect toad, was eyes and feet, and lumpy back, as though a fist was gripping it firmly round the spine, with the knuckles just under the skin. Most crawled, some hopped, all were oblivious of me. Hundreds were crossing when I saw them, and hundreds still were passing in front of me five minutes later. It was as though the lake held a billion years of toads, and was pouring them out as a star does heat and light. I didn’t dare try to step among them. I had to take a run-up, jump, and hope my heels hadn’t caught the edge of the parade.

As with toadlets by the lake, so with froglets in our garden. On some sunny days when there’s been rain and the grass takes on an ultra-vivid green, we can stop at the edge of the gravel I haven’t got around to removing, and see the ground creep. Small bodies are moving between the blades. Small bodies turn up crawling among the flowers, by the vegetables, sitting watching on the football left out overnight. Like the adults they can stay motionless for ages, but for the vibration of their throats. Unlike the toadlets they give themselves away by shining from toe to gold-dust eye. Meanwhile in the pond hundreds more tadpoles, froglets and all forms in between are moving through the weed with the pondskaters, freshwater shrimps, snails, diving beetles and the slower-growing toadpoles.

The summer advances, and all the little frogs disappear (quite a lot are eaten by the birds). The adults and some half-sized juveniles keep floating in the water until around the end of (my) lawnmowing season. Almost all our daughter can see of “her” frogs are the heaving legs that object when things fall in the pond.

I say “almost” because each year some toadpoles fail to metamorphose. They swim on and on into autumn. When I try to clear the pond of the weed that clogs it end to end at this time of year, I have to scoop them out of the leaves, and drop them again into the soil-brown water. This winter, when the frosts were few I’m sure that only the floods that first began in late December will have killed them. After the first round of flooding the pond was clear as Caribbean water, and we could see down to the leaf layer at the bottom. No tadpoles then. Now though, the water’s murky with sediment again and the tadpoles are wriggling from their jelly, even harder to count than their parents.