I don’t know if anyone already knows about my Jane and her tadpoles. Well I’ll begin with my story about our frog farm.
Where we came from in Yorkshire we had a big fishpond and a small natural pond for Jane, the David Bellamy of the North. She’s always loved animals of any shape or description, she’s there on the front row. As we had a wildlife pond we had frogs laying spawn in it, year after year. We watched them hatch and become tiny frogs.
Our previous frog farm
One year we saw what must have been well over a hundred tiny frogs all out of the pond and running for cover up the garden path! You couldn’t have walked among them or you’d have killed them. Ugh me thinks, not likely!
The frogs didn’t half keep the slug and snail population down, as we had millions of the blooming things enjoying our plants. That is not allowed! Jane and I used to go out at night at about 10pm with a plastic bag and torch each. We literally picked hundreds of them up every night. Of course, we had rubber gloves on and did a lot of ‘urghing’ and ‘arghing’ when we picked the squashy things up. If anyone had seen us with rubber gloves on, shining a torch in the dark they’d have thought we had truly lost it. I doubt they’d have been surprised and would probably just think ‘oh it’s them being strange again’! However the frogs, when mature, gobbled a lot of them up and almost got rid of them all, so that was a good thing.
Anyway, fast forward a long time and back to Cleveleys.
Our current frog farm!
A friend of Jane’s had very kindly turned up one cold day in March with a bucket full of spawn. Despite watching over them, they weren’t growing very much at all. Having had them before, we knew how far on they should be so. As they weren’t even growing I suggested that they were hungry. So as fast as a flash, she got some fish food, ground it to a powder between two saucers and put it in.
Well, talk about piranha’s. They were definitely hungry as they gobbled all the food in a frenzy. She’s been feeding them a few times every day for a couple or three weeks and miracle of miracles, they grew! My dear daughter, ever young at heart, kept running in with a bulletin each time they put weight on, full of excitement. Especially when their tiny legs started to appear and lo and behold a few days later Kevin spotted a minute frog in the plants.
To say Jane was thrilled to bits would be an understatement. She was ecstatic, finding us all to tell us the latest on frog farm. Then yesterday morning, apparently loads of them were making a bid for freedom onto the lawn and into the borders! I thought she was going to have a hissy fit with that bit of news bless her, she’s been waiting a long time after all. We’re hoping some of them make it to become big frogs and do the gobbling of slugs here too. The trouble is that they are so tiny but very cute, well to Jane anyway. So we’ll have to wait and see.
Frog dissection…
When I was at grammar school I absolutely loved biology. Although when it came to dissecting rats and frogs, it was a case of get used to it or else. The trouble was, they were white rats, commercially produced and sent out in glass jars with so many in one that they were full to bursting.
But the rub came when they were taken out of the jar of formalin preservative and had gone from white to yellow. Then we had to put them on their backs and flatten them out, usually breaking their legs to do it. Then we hammered the legs of the rat or frog down, spread eagled ready to dissect. To this day I can hear the sound of breaking bones when I talk about it.
Apparently did you know, that a rat’s body, followed secondly by a frog, is the closest internally to a human body. I found that fascinating. Then we had to cut them open, with a neat slice down the front from top to bottom and take the organs out, which while gruesome was also fascinating. The trouble was, I hated to think of them being bred to be killed, it really got to me.
Frogs weren’t as abundant so we spent one lesson going beyond the school sports field and onto a steep banking to find what we could – which thankfully was nothing. Then we were asked if anyone had a neighbour with a pond to try and catch some and take them in.
Have you got any frogs?
I asked a friend about the frogs in their pond (which was always stuffed with them). She said I could have as many as I wanted. All this time later and I can still remember the feeling I got when she produced a tin box with about 20 mature frogs in it.
The trouble was, the more I looked at them, my very soft side came out and told me not to have them killed. So I let them all go in our garden and didn’t hang on to the teacher what I’d done! Well, could you have taken them knowing they would be killed and cut up?
When it comes to any sort of wildlife, or in fact anything under the sun, I still get upset if they’re ill treated. And that includes insects too. I can’t abide some insects, especially spiders, but I still couldn’t kill one. Sloppy thing aren’t I.
I do hope you haven’t been put off from eating your cornflakes! I don’t know if they still do dissections in schools – Jane didn’t do them. But I can tell you they aren’t for the faint hearted!
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