I lie on my belly with my head as close to the pond as I can get without getting wet. For a few moments I join the watery world beneath me, of tiny brown midge larvae fizzing at the surface, of pond snails gliding over algae-fuzzed stones. In some parts the water is green with algae, in others it’s black with tadpoles.
If it wasn’t for the tadpoles I would fish out the algae, but there are so many of them that I can’t do so without harming them. So I watch them eat it instead, nibbling it off leaves on the surface, off the stones beneath. Some of the tadpoles are getting big now, and developing a taste for meat. It’s around this time that I substitute their diet with fish flakes so they don’t turn on each other, although it’s too late for one clump of frogspawn that was laid last week, which is being devoured by its cousins.
Elsewhere in the garden, leaves are unfurling and buds are bursting, but it’s the pond that’s the star of the show. Just four years old, it took two years for the frogs to start spawning in it, but they do so now with such gusto that birds can walk on it from one side of the pond to the other. More recently there have been toads: last year eight males spent a week calling, unsuccessfully, for females, but this year they managed it – you could hear my squeals of delight from space. Now I trace tramlines of ribbon-like toadspawn around submerged stems of marsh marigold, as well as some underwater bits of a tree branch I placed at the edge of the pond, which doubles up as a dragonfly perch. I am thoroughly delighted.
Smooth newts also turned up this year, gravid (pregnant) females flirting with colourful males who waft pheromones towards them with their gently crested tails. They lay their eggs individually inside folded-over leaves – I search, but see nothing yet. The newts will eat some of the frogspawn, of course, but that should stop the frog tadpoles feasting on the toadspawn jelly. It’s a frog-eat-frog-eat-toad-eat-newt kind of world, and it’s wonderful.
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