The entry quoted below comes from my Facebook page, written last spring.
Some would call it love and romance, but I’d ascribe it to the primal force that drives all creatures.
About two years ago I dumped a jar full of tadpoles in the small pond of my postage-stamp-sized front garden. They thrived. And then they vanished.
Last summer, I was delighted to hear two adult frogs had made it from tadpolehood to being grownups. However, it became evident that these two frogs were females, and no amount of wishful thinking and same-sex laissez-faire on my part would result in new generations of tadpoles.
Some months later I found one turned into roadkill outside my house. Being as I live some 700m away from the watery bits of Alberts Farm, I gave up hope of turning the spinster frog into a mom without getting in a new generation of tadpoles who might provide Ms Frog with partnership possibilities.
Cut to this weekend. I heard frogs calling from a distance, about a block away. Fanciful me wondered if a suitor frog might be making his way up the hill to find Ms Frog. Silly idea, innit?
Except. About half an hour ago I heard the bass tones of another voice….
Grabbed the torch and went out to look. Sure as frog’s eggs is frog’s eggs, he is here! He just hopped under the driveway gate and is headed for the pond.
They are serenading one another.
That’s a helluva journey, cos she’s the only frog I’ve heard on this hillside in all the time I’ve been here!
I have a lone goldfish and some tilapia in the pond, so the circle of life will get some menu variation over the next few months, but in life how persistence pays.
Cut to this year, and I was wondering if the frogs had gone to the amphibian afterlife. My pond had been dotted with little tadpoles all of last summer but I hadn’t seen any reach maturity. Not a very successful frog breeding program, it would seem.
But nature triumphs, again. Two nights ago, the frog pair started their evening serenade just outside my front door. Voices a little rusty, but they’re still here…and I expect the pond will once more be dotted with pinpricks of black.
SIX MILLION TREES 