Frogspawn Success

After the recent operation to drain the pond to prevent more frogs dying in the foul water, I deliberately put some rain water from a water butt into the pond just in case any more frogs turned up to spawn in the usual place. This turned out to have been a good move, because yesterday the pond contained several balls of frogspawn. Meanwhile none of the pairs of frogs I rescued and relocated to the other pond have spawned there. Most of them appear to have moved on from that pond, and I suspect they returned to this pond to spawn when we had a lot of rain the other day. It looks like the instinct to return to the same spawning location year after year drives them even after they have paired up in a pond. They have spent over a week in pairs since I relocated them, but appear to have made the trip back up the garden to the original pond before spawning.

Frog and Frogspawn

Frog Tragedy in the Old Pond

To my horror I discovered last night that our the old pond had turned into a deathtrap for frogs. It appears that a lot of leaves sunk into the pond over the Autumn and Winter, making the water foul. I went to check for frogspawn and noticed a dead frog. Disturbing the water revealed that the whole pond was foul, and many more dead frogs were found while trying to clean out the dead leaves hiding below the water surface. Some of these were clearly only recently deceased. One was full of spawn. I think they had suffocated due to lack of oxygen in the water. With more frogs turning up for the spawning season, I had to take drastic action and decided to empty the pond. In total I found about 15 dead frogs, and rescued 5 mating pairs who thankfully appeared healthy. I relocated the healthy pairs to the smaller water feature pond in another part of the garden. The frogs have not adopted this newer pond, presumably because they return to the pond of their birth to spawn. I decided to drain the old pond to prevent any more frogs drowning in it. Hopefully now the newer pond is a hotbed of mating action they will spawn there rather than heading back up the garden to the original one again.



This is the old pond, from which I cleaned out as much muck as possible and then added some fresh water from the rainwater butts in the garden in case more frogs return to spawn. You can see the frog escape ramp I have fitted so that they can get out again.

The frogs seem happy enough in their new temporary home. I hope they will relocate back to the new pond once it is completed and fit to inhabit. I will probably move some frog spawn to the new pond when it is ready as the pond that these frogs are in at the moment is too small for them, and I want the offsping to return to the new pond to spawn in future years.

Work Starts on Wildlife Pond

Two productive days work in the garden with much help from my father-in-law has seen the basic shape of the long planned pond dug out. We have an old pond which was there when we moved into the house, but it fails in all the important criteria for a wildlife pond. A well designed pond for wildlife should feature the following:
- Shallow sides to allow easy access to wildlife
- Shallow water zones (<50cm depth)
- Deep water zone (>50cm depth, preferably 1 metre deep)
- A large enough overall volume to cope with Summer temperatures

Our old pond has vertical sides and a uniform depth of about 50cm. Too deep for frogspawn and not deep enough to stop the water getting too hot in Summer. The new pond is much larger and will have the required shallow and deep zones. Due to the gradual slope across the garden, we had to build up the down slope edge of the pond to make the edges level all round. This has the major advantages that we do not have to dig as deep a hole to get the desired 1 metre depth, and we can use all the spoil to build up the ground around the lower end of the pond. You can see the basic shape in the picture below. The old pond is located in the corner of the garden at the back of this picture. Eventually I hope to remodel the original pond and turn it into a header pond for a waterfall, flowing into the new pond.



Our garden is on the site of an old builders yard, and we were still digging through rubble at the bottom of the pond. Eventually we will use all the rubble we have dug out to raise the surrounding area back up to the new raised edge of the pond, resulting in a pond that is set into a level garden.