How to turn your garden into a nature reserve
As summer days tempt us outdoors, we all have the opportunity to open our eyes to the natural world on our doorsteps. There are 15 million domestic gardens in Britain, and each one of them is teeming with life.
It’s all worth it when you see the frog. Could be a proverb, couldn’t it? An Albanian one, or maybe an Armenian one, to partner other proverbs, like: The hedgehog never pricks himself on his own spines. But what I’m referring to is the long wait, the long patient hours. No, days. No, weeks of tadpole keeping, of bringing to term those little black swimming things that begin their lives like fish, and end up like animals.
Their transformation is quite something to witness. This year we took some of them out of the pond and put them in a washing-up bowl with a large stone in the middle, and after weeks of observing, changing the water, removing the bodies of those that didn’t survive, it started to happen: the tadpoles developed back legs, then front legs, and then, bam! They were crawling out of the water on to the stone, their mouths magically changed from an Ooooo shape to an Eeeee shape, their tails rapidly shrinking away. They’d become froglets before our very eyes.
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