Invasion of the Frogs.

Yesterday morning, we awoke to find frogspawn in our pond, not just a little clump but loads of the stuff. Some time ago I read that, although the mating process in frogs lasts four weeks, each pair only lays one cluster; by that reckoning, a year ago we had four breeding pairs. Today we have at least twelve; it's difficult to be precise as the different patches are too close together and have merged. Certainly, when we creep out and count, we can see a dozen or more heads poking out and, going by the size of those heads, they are mostly males.

There are suggestions that we should clean out the pond, but it is obviously thriving and it would be a shame to disturb things too much, particularly as we are aware that there are newts around although we rarely see them. In late summer, we'll have the problem of lawn maintenance when the froglets start migrating, the grass went uncut for a month or more last year for fear of decapitating the little chaps; we also felt guilty about attracting the starlings in to feast on them by putting out bird food.

This is actually Mrs TD's picture, I think she feels a little chuffed to have her own, first blip, even though it is by proxy.