Frogs and frog spawn are things of childhood. Or were. Now you're not allowed to carry frog spawn from a ditch or pond to your owns garden. Pity. It was always one of the rites of spring among children to watch some of the jelly stuff, gradually maturing, the black dots becoming elongated into tadpoles, which eventually metamorhosed into tiny frogs.
But it takes the French to put a glamour on it all. The headline in a recent newspaper read: "Toads, Frogs, Newts: the season of love begins very early in the parks and gardens of Paris." And it goes on to compare human beings, enjoying themselves in the spring sunshine (lucky people) on cafe terraces, with certain little creatures, amphibians and others, croaking their love songs in secret and sunny places. The great abodes for newts and frogs, it says, are in the two woodlands of Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne.
One water creature worries the authorities, the Florida tortoise, they call it. People buy them small - maybe the size of a walnut - then they grow and grow and are abandoned by their owners. Fierce, they tolerate no other creature in their piece of water.
Anyway, back home. How is it, some ask, when you see and hear frogs congregating round a pool or pond at mating time, yet you seldom see them there again. Well, it seems, frogs don't spend all that much time in water. Especially if you live within hopping distance of a river or any stretch of water, you will often find one sitting snugly at the foot of one of your leafy plants, or young trees. Good shade. Or it could be under a log or a stone. They take on the colour, more or less, of their background, green or brown maybe. They have predators after them. Herons especially. Some mammals, too. A shrew was once seen attacking a frog. Surely only to take a bite or two?
Christopher Moriarty, in fact, in A Natural History of Ireland (Mercier pocketbook 1972) says flatly that the adult frog is a land animal, but must keep to fairly moist conditions. The newt lives in water, but can survive for some time on land, if it, too, can stay moist.
Watching your frog spawn grow into a host of small froglets was part of the land of lost content. Governments (is Brussels behind this?) can be damned silly.