Wildlife

e shifted the pile of rotten wood at the end of the garden over the weekend to make way for some autumn fruiting raspberries and we found a couple of friends :)

ast spring Dan and I carted frogspawn back from Scotland (we couldn't find any close to home at all - we tried!) to try and populate the garden with some slug busting help. We'd not seen any frogs/toads around at all and given our situation in a tarmac island with high walls, thought we were pretty unlikely to get any unless we helped out a bit. The frogspawn hatched and the froglets eventually left our pond. Periodically we'd find them on our midnight slug hunts through the dank summer of 2009. We thought we'd lost them though this spring. No sign of them anywhere till our neighbour told us he'd found some under his folded up greenhouse plastic. Then when we shifted the wood, down in the rotten leaves, one of our scottish frogs, all grown up. But... he'd also made a friend in Mr. Toad.

bad blurry photo due to lack of light

here was another larger, greener, frog under a second pile of wood we moved too. This pile was one of my purposefully built "habitats" for which I have endured a substantial amount of ribbing from Dan (and others). I did a short stint as a volunteer in the Natural History Museum wildlife garden as an undergraduate and they used to build wooden towers out of prunings and fallen logs for things to live in. I'm quite glad my silly habitat's have genuinely turned into homes for the creatures. I now want to crack open the one next to the pond to see if it has become a home too, but I shall resist and leave potential residents in peace.