Amphibious Assault

Frogs are in crisis.

This I find quite upsetting because my childhood did involve quite a lot of activities around frogs, ponds and watercourses in the days when no second thought was really given to the chances of falling in, getting a booter or tragically, suffering a drowning which was quite a regular statistic for that time.

Ranging about quite freely even when very young I would marvel at the bubbling cauldron of a field ditch or a shady pool where water boatmen would skim about the surface and sticklebacks would dart into the weedy shallows if pursued by a brightly coloured nylon net on a long, flimsy bamboo pole. Strange gassy bubbles would burst unannounced and randomly out of the muddy deposits and erupt in a burp of some odorous content, concentric circles would be seen with no apparent creator, a silver flash caught the late afternoon sunlight as a  fish propelled itself at its own shadow or a languishing fly who dared to rest on the tight ,glassy miniscus.

The current concerns about the frog population are indicative of the trend in more recent years for their natural habitats to be lost, either dried up from changes in the water table as agricultural demand takes any ground water supplies, filled in to counter litigation for injury or death even from trespassing youngsters, built over with housing or commercial development or turned into a neglected toxic swamp from choking weed and algae.

To some extent the natural environments have been replaced by ornamental ponds and water features in domestic gardens but this has been only a short term life raft for frogs. The world of the frog has been condensed into the dimensions of a typical  back garden whereas, since the dawn of time, they have been free to roam about at will from damp flower bed to beck to stream to pond to lake and so on.

The main implication of a much more restrictive habitat is that frogs are now more likely to in-breed and we all know, on a human scale, that a consequence of such does not bode well in the longer term. Cousins, idiots and all that speculation.

There are other threats and these can be regarded as being more of a spin-off from changes in the climate. There was a certain interdependence between the species residing in natural bodies of water and a time in the seasons for the cycles of reproduction, nurture and growth to maturity for each so that the circle of life was perpetuated but not so as to infringe on each other. It now appears that the newt population is spawning much earlier than it has before and this coincides with, unfortunately, the main period when frogspawn is at its peak. This provides a veritable feast for the newly emerged newts but with a devastating effect on the numbers and welfare of their former co-habitees. Nature or natural conspiracy?

I have not seen frog spawn or in fact any abundance of young hatched frogs for some years. The stretch of common land in the Greenbelt between western Hull and one of its satellite towns has declined significantly in its role as a breeding ground for the amphibious creatures. A few years ago the local residents undertook a campaign to herd frogs across the busy main road with a supervised crossing point to minimise the quite disturbing sight of one dimensional frogs which had been squashed flat by the constant traffic.The warning road sign on approaching the stretch of road has also just recently disappeared as an indictment of unsustainability of this once thriving environment. 

It would be a terrible shame for the frog population to diminish further and inconceivable for their numbers to reach anything like an 'at risk' level. It may be time now to create more ponds and water areas of expansive dimensions as part of this buzz word for bio-diversity before it is too late for the species and they are forced to retreat from all but close contact with humans.

We can all do our little bit. A starting point would be to make all children fully proficient in open water swimming and survival techniques and as parents, a bit more sympathetic and understanding on the phenomena of a booter.