Frogs

Frogs

Each year when the frogs are spawning I like to take a photo with as many frogs in as possible to gauge roughly how many frogs are in the pond. Last year I took a photo with 85 frogs in the one shot, the year before 50.

This year so far my best photo has 96 frogs in the one shot.

Unfortunately the frogs were all moving too much which made focusing a bit of an issue as well as choosing the best moment to take the photo. This photo has 96 frogs in and it only covers 1/3 of the pond.

The rest of the pond only had the odd few in that could be seen. 

I know there are loads more frogs under the water, swimming and hiding so I'm hopeful tonight I may get to snap a better photo with even more in the one shot.

Click to enlarge photos.

The spawning has only just begun and I expect that whole area to be covered in spawn by the time they finish.

The best shot is normally the night shot when all the eyes are lit up by the flash and you get an spooky picture with hundreds of eyes poking out of the water.

The noise of the frogs croaking is very loud at times and I estimate that there will be a good 150 frogs in the pond at any one time as a minimum.

I can see by the size of the frogs that these are not last years young, they are much smaller, and I keep finding them all over the garden. I don't know how many of the young frogs from last year survived but judging by the number seen pottering around the garden there must be a couple of hundred. If I had to guess at the number of frogs, young and older, that live in and around the garden I think it must be 3 or 4 hundred because these ones in the pond are all too big to be last years or the years before. I only see a dozen or so of these larger ones in the garden on any week and only come across masses of smaller frogs so if you add up the 150 ish in the pond with the smaller ones in the garden I think there'll easily be 300 plus frogs.

This doesn't include the toads that appear a little later, in much smaller numbers, and we have a load of newts. The newts also bred last year in the pond but I haven't seen toad spawn yet.

All these amphibians are supported by the one 18 ft long  by 6 ft wide pond in our garden.

Next to us, a couple of hundred metres away there is a 1/3 or an acre pond which must have a load more frogs, toads and newts. In another 2 directions we have ditches or dykes within 100 metres with water in plus to the south of us at about 600 metres away there is a pond / fishing lake of an acre in size which must also have frogs etc.

Within our immediate vicinity there must be thousands of frogs, toads and newts!

The previous posts about frogs are here