Frog City

Frog City on the Basingstoke Canal

Guest post by Simon Hughes   

Walking a ten-mile stretch of the Basingstoke Canal on an unseasonably mild day, bird life on and around the  water was abundant, including a kingfisher. A brimstone fluttered upwards and violets, primroses and celandine were making their first appearance.  For a long while, there was a fisherman every fifteen yards or so but they seemed to only be catching tiddlers. In any case, the murkiness of the canal combined with the bright sky reflections made it difficult to see any life in the canal. 

That was until I passed the last fisherman, when out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a few bubbles rising through the reedy vegetation at the side of the canal. Closer inspection revealed the bubbles were a couple of frogs bobbing up and down. Even closer inspection revealed that it wasn't a couple of frogs but many dozens in the vegetation. I had discovered Frog City. Perhaps the vegetation offered a prop for resting in the sun that was easy to escape from should a predator, or nosy human, hove too close.

Moving along the bank, I saw more and more frogs sunning themselves and occasionally popping up or down. Eventually, I came to a single huge conglomeration of frogspawn, clearly of different maturities since the "black dots" were of different size. There were more frogs amongst the spawn than anywhere else. And while I was watching, one jumped on top of another. I'm not sure it was a happy pairing since the jumped upon flailed its legs violently . But all that did was to encourage more frogs to leap on the pair. I felt obliged to leave them to their business. That day, apart from Frog City, I saw nothing else moving in the canal.

Pondlife

Towards the end of last winter I dug a pond on my allotment and planted a bird feeding station nearby. The birds arrived soon enough, gobbling up fat balls and mealworms while they raised their chicks, and sometimes visiting the pond to drink in the evening.

Ponds take a little longer to develop. I planted flag iris, marsh marigold and water mint around the margins and water crowfoot in the pond itself. Two pond skaters were the first sign of animal life but my excitement was short-lived: they disappeared two weeks later, probably eaten by birds. Red damselflies made a brief visit in May, followed by a flourishing of not-so-welcome mosquito larvae.

In mid-summer, the water suddenly cleared, revealing teeming colonies of invertebrates: pond-snails, worms and tiny beetles. Soon after, a sprinkling of duckweed coated the surface and blanket weed began to form beneath it. By late August, my early amphibian dreams were almost forgotten...

As I sat by the pond one day, removing blanket weed, a pair of eyes caught mine, protruding from the water under overhanging grass. A tiny frog! I experienced a childlike sense of wonder and gratitude that it should choose to live in my pond. Then I glimpsed a diving beetle, rowing back and forth between the bottom and the surface.

Two days later I returned to the pond with my partner and a camera. He snapped away, as I planted some hollyhocks and over the next hour we counted at least six frogs, some of them much larger than the first I spotted. One of them was a giant and quite unafraid of us as he lazed in the shallows.

The magic of creating a tiny ecosystem more than rewards all the digging and waiting.