Walking on water

The level of the water in our pond is a bit low at the moment, probably due to the lack of rain, but it can't help that William, the squirrels and birds all drink from it daily.

I've filled two large buckets with tap water and am waiting for the gases? to settle before I tip them into the pond. Today I fished out an ant from one of the buckets, but before I fished it out I watched it for a couple of minutes as it walked across the surface of the water. I never knew that they could do that.

Tadpoles again

Here's a picture of our tadpoles, taken a few days ago.



Although the main group is still there, around a third of the tadpoles have been more adventurous and set off across the pond. We're really looking forward to lots of little froglets later in the year.

Tadpoles

In response to my father's blog I went out to the pond today on a search for newts. There was no sign of any, but the frogspawn has hatched and now there are hundreds of wriggly little tadpoles at one end of the pond. My photos didn't turn out very well so I shall try again tomorrow.

Fur loss

One of the squirrels that visits our garden has a strange pattern on its back, which appears to be caused by a loss of fur in a diamond shape. Does anyone have any ideas what may have caused this?

Rain

Finally, for the first time in ages it's raining in Exeter. Until this morning I had been considering getting the hosepipe out to water the garden - it's incredibly dry and I have lots of small vulnerable plants in the borders at the moment. I'm not sure if it's being in the South or having clay soil or a bit of both, but we don't seem to have much of a balance throughout the year - either the garden is muddy, sticky and has surface water or the soil is dry and cracked.

We're hoping to turf the back lawn this March. Hope that coincides with a wet spell or I will be out with the hosepipe very soon.

Frog spawn

I'm pleased to say that the frogs at Frog End have spawned for the first time in the big pond.



The smaller pond doesn't have as much cover for frogs at the moment, but I hope to plant it up in the next couple of weeks.

Don't forget to put your frog spawn records on the Nature's Calendar site.

Squirrels on ice

I often use my camera to take videos. Recently I've taken quite a few of animals and birds in the garden. Here is one of two of our squirrels exploring the frozen pond. If you're worried that they were thirsty they did have water at the feeder at the time.

This video has no sound.