Countryman Ramblings.

YOUR POND

Remember your pond? Yes that wet thing tucked away at the bottom of your garden that drove you round the bend last summer. If you were lucky it was only algae that had you reluctantly scooping it out, remembering to leave the green mess on the ponds edge so any little creatures tucked up in the green sheets could scuttle back into the water. Or maybe it was duckweed. Remember? You really thought you got every piece out. Great wasn’t it. One month later it was all back. Maybe you were really unlucky and you had both. God I hate and love ponds.

By the second week in February the frogs will have come out of hibernation; I’m talking about our common frog, the other two are no better than that grey tree rat. The common only croaks in the breeding season, although I’m told before he goes into hibernation he croaks his intention, but personally I’ve never heard it.

What awakens him from his four months of sleeping, no one, not even our knowledgeable scientists know. Yet come February in the south and March further up north, awake he does.

Remember that algae that so annoyed you, well without it our frogs would be hard pressed to find their way back to the pond. The algae’s scent floats constantly on the air, once awake the frog will use that scent to guide him. The frogs first duty on waking is to breed and by the noise that emanates from my pond they do it in gusto.

Just days after the spawn has been laid and the frogs quieten down and start to eat the pests in the garden, then the grass snakes awake. They slither out of their hibernaculum: banks, hedge bottoms or manure heaps. As many as a dozen sleep together, their bodies intertwined, not for warmth, but to make themselves larger and more difficult for predators to consume.

Nature has timed the snakes awakening to correspond with the frogs’ first appearance; the grass snakes first priority is to eat and the breeding frogs are easy targets. So without the frogs the grass snakes future would be almost certainly extinction.

So come on, build yourself a pond: for once size doesn’t matter: just don’t put fish in it.