Stranded

Tadpoles love to sunbake. This one at only about a week old was sunbaking a little too long and managed to become stranded on top of a lilly pad.

In out warm climate water evaporates quickly and pond levels can drop several centimetres in a day.


Lucky it was rescued in time.

The long wait.

Over the second winter the frogs all seemed to disappear. The fish were gone but I kept tending the pond. I had heard that it may take years for a pond to start producing tadpoles, anyway dragonflies larvae were developing and taking care of the mosquitoes. I had also put my name down on a local tadpole program where people with excess tadpoles or unwanted taddies give them away to people nearby hoping that a suitable donor would appear.

Here's our frogless frog pond.

http://202.14.152.30/frogwatch/pages/tadpole_exchange.asp

This is the link if you are in Western Australia to go on the tadpole exchange program. I wonder if there are others like this around the world?

Then with the spring, nearly two years after bringing home the tadpoles I heard the marvelous sound of a motorbike frog. It was an exciting moment but the excitement turned to pity for the frog as it seemed to keep calling day and night for weeks and sounded so lonely. I had grave doubts that any other frog was around to hear it.

This link takes you to a recording of their call which sounds just like a dirt bike changing up gears. Well worth a listen.

http://www.museum.wa.gov.au/frogwatch/pages/frogs/sw/10.asp

In the meantime the neighbour who breeds Koi (a foreign enemy of frogs) had told me he had found a frog in his Koi pond that was being attacked by his fish. He had rescued it and thought he could help the frog by putting it down a storm drain so it would find a swamp somewhere.

I know he meant well, he just didn't know drains are not pathways to earthly heavens for frogs but lead to pipes that release into the ocean. I felt all was lost.

Then a few days later I could hear three motorbike frogs calling from his back yard. Why his backyard?? At least I knew there were frogs about.

Then on my Dad's birthday I was looking into the pond - pondering and there was something that looked like a tadpole. I thought it must have been a tiny twig and poked it. Sure enough it moved. There were hundreds of little tadpoles. What a wonderful, joyful sight. This photo is taken after two weeks of growth.

Algae, algae and more algae!

With warm weather and sun exposure (essential for tadpoles healthy development) algae is bound to bloom. The good part of this is that algae is a food for many tadpoles. The bad part is that algae can and did choke plants and during the night depleted water of oxygen and caused the tradgedy that killed off my fish. The idea is to get a balance.

I tried algae killer that claimed to be friendly to fauna and threw in some barley staw with no success. I introduced duck weed to try to cut out its source of light and energy but the algae simply grew faster and grew on the duckweed until it was so heavy the duck weed sunk like the Titanic.

The emergent water plant (a native species of Acanthaceae) also struggled with algae choking anything under the water but the algae couldn't touch the leaves that made it above the water level. This plant is known for its ability to soak up excess nutrients that can promote algal growth.

Water lillies also managed to grow above where algae couldn't swamp it.

To control strand algae I remove it by hand when I can see it in large lumps. Algae is a useful organic addition to your soil. Be warned however that little creatures hide in algae and it is worth giving it a check before disposal. I once had a large tadpole that had held over transforming into a frog over winter drop onto my lap when I was flinging algae into the garden and often find dragon fly nymphs and snails too.

Managing Mosquito Larvae

There is nothing quite like spending time by the pond watching little beings such as frogs, dragon flies, hover flies, and birds live their busy lives.

However this experience was made far less pleasant when certain little beings busy lives include sucking blood out of you and possibly giving you diseases (around here Ross River Virus is spread by mosquitoes) and if you are like me mosquito bites cause itchy welts. In the end I was busy cutting their lives short to extend my own!

Much to my horror my pond was a first rate breeding ground for these creatures. I was torn. There is no such thing as a totally tadpole friendly fish. However some are kinder than others, so after researching I bought four local West Australian pygmy perch. They only grow about 6 cm long and because of their dull colouring I rarely got a glimpse of them. However they did do an excellent job of eating mosquitoe larvae.


I don't have a pump and had to keep the pond topped up to keep oxygen levels high as well as regularly removing algal growth by hand. The fish bred to quite large numbers. I estimate between 50 - 60 of these fish were in the ponder in under a year.


Unfortunately my father suddenly grew ill and I spent time away from home to be with him. Sadly he passed and after returning home all the fish were floating on top of the pond, dead. I assume that not topping up the pond and allowing the algae to grow unchecked for a fortnight caused a lack of oxygen which killed them all.

Other surprises from Frog friendly gardens.

I suspect it took a wee bit of will power for my husband not to scream when he was about to put his foot down on this lovely visitor.

These heat loving lizards can look quite scary as they hiss and open their mouth up wide and poke out their blue tongues when they feel threatened.

Covering their heads gently and picking them up behind their necks while supporting their bodies with your other hand makes it easy to move them somewhere a little more natural for them. I wonder if they eat frogs?

The bridge.

The bridge offers shade for our pond as well as giving a great viewing platform. The shade is important to prevent too much algal growth and ensures the pond won't get too hot. The frogs when startled are quite happy to dive under it for cover as well as finding it a place to hang out.

My husband and I designed and made the bridge - it was a very simple design.
Two long treated pine sleepers that we sawed the ends off (we borrowed a chain saw to do this) to form an angle that were set atop 4" by 2" f10 hardwood. It was slightly wider than the sleepers to form a lip that the frogs like to sit on. Then we nailed decking on. It took us only a couple of hours to build the whole bridge once we started. Then we just had to sit it over our pond. Wallah!

Building a frog pond from scratch.

Some research into frogs in our state indicated that it is against the law to keep frogs in captivity without a license. It also turned out that releasing frogs into other local habitats was not a good idea either as it may introduce diseases and unbalances the DNA pool by releasing frogs that have reached adulthood with great assistance rather than having the fittest survive through natural means.
With help from my wonderful spouse we followed the advice from this pamphlet found at http://www.wrc.wa.gov.au/swanavon/pdf/pub_frogs.pdf and also advice from frogs.org.au/frogwatch/bitg.html
The advice is local so I would recommend you see if you can find local advice.
We let the water settle for three days before releasing the frogs and changelings into the pond.
They must have liked it because we saw them hanging around the pond on warm days from then on.

Tadpoles are easy - young frogs on the other hand...

I fed the tadpoles on boiled lettuce leaves and they sucked the flesh off it. They were also fed fish food that they just couldn't seem to get enough of. That bucket load of tadpoles soon started growing legs and arms. The changlings were moved into a an aquarium where they had easy access to land.

I had read that they needed 10% of there body weight in live food. I spent such a ridiculous amount of time stalking and catching flies and other insects to feed the young frogs, I felt like I had become half frog myself!

I loved watching the froglets stalking the crawling insects, before leaping with open mouths and a stubby tongue to gobble their prey. But much to my frustration they simply didn't show any interest in the easy to catch slugs and snails on offer and ignored the mosquitoes which seemed to instinctively know just to keep still.

Welcome to my Frog Pond page.

Welcome to the frog pond network.

It all began when a fellow teacher asked me on the last day of school if I wanted some tadpoles that she was going to place into her Koi pond. I couldn't bare to think of those poor tadpoles destroyed by Koi (a foreign fish here in Australia), so took them home. All to our dry barren coastal garden!!

This blog is a story in progress about my novice experience as a frog lover.