You go to pick up a leaf outside the kitchen door, beside the log pile, and the leaf is live to the touch and jumps into the logs. A frog. Which reminds you that this is surely tadpole time. And huge drifts of white jelly on the surface of ponds and in wet ditches will see their little central dots turn into commas, and lengthen, and then we have the tadpoles swimming. And you remember the jampots with their precious spawn which you put into tin baths at home or a garden pool if you are that sort of person, and all the wonder as the tadpoles swam, wriggling their tails, then grew legs and ultimately became frogs.
It was good to hear from the Wild life people that schools are exempted from the general ban on collecting frogspawn, and so children can watch another of Nature's wonderful stories develop. The frog is a vulnerable creature. It appears on the menu of a huge array of other animals, notes Chris Mattison in his book on Frogs and Toads of the World (Blandford). In our environment, herons would be a major enemy, and other wading birds. Even shrews, as well as other mammals, would eat them. (And a family dog used to tramp on them and then roll on them.)
At their aquatic age, as tadpoles, fish relish them. People eat them - not our common type which is rans temporaria, but rana esculenta. Only the legs, it is said, are used for culinary purposes. The main defence of the frog is in its fecundity, says Mattison. Enormous numbers of eggs are produced and fertilised. One book claimed that our own frog may give as much as 4,000 tadpoles. Apart from breeding time, when they may congregate around a pool, they are not so often seen. And certainly they do not spend much time in water. Gardeners know that in turning over a stone or lifting up dropping plant leaves, they will often come across the beady eye of a quiet-living, well-camouflaged frog.
What do they eat as adults? They are, apparently, carnivorous and live on such creatures as ants, beetles, slugs, snails, worms and anything crawling of suitable size. But it's as the tadpoles in the glass tank in the schoolroom that you chiefly think of them.