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.