I sat on my Thai garden chair and enjoyed my frog pond for the first time in at least four years.
The frog plague is over! For the last few years I have been scooping up at least fifty dead frogs with red skins and spawn has also come tinged with red.
Before that for several years there were so many frogs marching into the garden from all directions that although the pond is quite large for an urban garden there was more frog than water and so many males clung to each female that even healthy females drowned. Serenity was non-existent even if one coulld stomach the smell of decaying flesh.
This year, however, I saw no more than 12 frogs and had only two clusters of spawn. There are now many tadpoles swimming happily, at least they do while the sun shines. Under clouds cover they tend to stay dormant.
The occasional tadpole gets eaten by newts that zoom in on them like dinosaurs seen through the wrong end of a telescope but that is nature. I suppose red leg frog plague is also nature's way of reducing an oversized frog population but it smells far worse than death by predator!
