A Walk on the Wild Side: Courting frogs, emerging seedlings

It's the first official day of Spring - and a stunningly beautiful warm day. My little garden pond is heaving gently with little flurries of tumbling kicks and splashes as the many frog couples get together and the males vie and fight for possession of the females.

Each year, from January onwards, depending on the weather, the frogs emerge from their winter hibernation places on land or in pond and ditch bottoms, and return to their same annual breeding pond. Most British common frogs now breed in small garden ponds, liking the warm shallow water (toads prefer it a bit deeper), so our little ponds are becoming increasingly important to our frog population as farm ponds decline. Here is an amorous frog couple that I was watching swim lazily on the warm surface of my pond this morning......

Once frogs reach their breeding pond, the pairing begins. Each male grabs an egg-swollen female, climbs on top of her and grasps her in an almost stranglehold (amplexus) embrace below her armpits, with his front legs. Once he's grasped his female, the male frog will not let go of his tight hold on her for several weeks or even months, until she has finished laying all of her eggs! The male frogs, once they have their partner in this tight embrace, make the most moving gentle, purring, low croaking sound. I think this is actually meant as a warning threat to other males, but in reality it sounds somewhat tender and contented. The females are mute, otherwise I imagine all the males' soft churring noises would be drowned out by protesting croaks from these poor half-suffocated, bloated females!

Other males may try to oust the male from his position but rarely succeed and instead may climb on board and grasp her too. Females may be injured in the process or even drowned if several male frogs clasp her and fight together (Hands up! - Who does not want to reincarnate as a female frog?!!). When I went out to watch and photograph the frogs this afternoon I realised that the frog couple in the photos above that I saw this morning, was not a couple - but were 2 males, clinging onto one female, one male above the other! You can see this better in the photo below..... If you look carefully you'll see that the second male frog has his head under the upper male frog. You can see the females hind legs, below the second male's splayed-out legs.....

Egg (spawn) laying happens in the dead of night - at about 3am, with frog couples congregating together in the same place in shallow water to lay individual clumps of eggs to create one large, gelatinous spawn mat. Each males fertilises his female's eggs by releasing his sperm into the water at the moment she ejects the eggs. Extraordinarily, these frogs will not eat throughout the whole breeding time, which can last from several weeks to over two months! Because this period follows on from their winter hibernation fast, some frogs become too weak to survive this breeding time.

I will try and continue watching my frogs and their emerging progeny over the coming weeks and months. As you can probably tell I have been reading up about frogs and their breeding habits! Most thanks for the information in this piece goes to Tevor Beebee's book: "Frogs and Toads".

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All the seeds I've sown in my conservatory have leapt out of the soil! I now have little pots of pea, broad bean, summer purple broccolli, early purple broccoli, kale and calendula marigold seedlings. In addition, my deep windowsill planters are full of mixed salad, red salad bowl and mizuna seedlings. This is my indoor cut and come again salad experiment, although if the temperatures stay this warm I may have to move these planters outside to continue growing as it may just be too warm for these in my conservatory.