Our ponds are another place to raise young

Amphibians

We're thrilled to have toads mate in our ponds. It's wonderful to hear their musical trills for weeks and to see their antics in the ponds. It's fascinating to watch babies develop from tiny eggs to little toadlets. Hearing a toad sing is now my favorite sign of spring.

Here are three of the toads. Note that the one in the middle is "singing." It's amazing that such a toady-looking creature could "sing" so beautifully. Generally, toads don't stay out in the open as much as they do during mating season.

Here is one mating pair in our wildlife pond in April. Note the long string of "black pearls" that are the eggs. The male is on top of the female and is smaller than she is. (The lighting is odd because the photo was taken early in the morning.)

A few days later. Note the jelly-like substance surrounding each egg.

Note the three toads in our pond skimmer. At one point all three pairs were here. I scooped them out, though, since I figured the eggs would just get pulled into the pump and wasted.

They like the moist, dark environment especially when the weather was dry. (Usually the top of the skimmer is on). They didn't seem to mind staying there even when I scooped any extra plant material out of the skimmer.

We loved watching the frogs scoot around the pond. They're fast! And yes, he did climb up onto the lily pad!

The twelfth day

Twenty-one days

Here are some of the literally thousands of tadpoles in our wildlife pond. There were thousands more in our "regular" pond.

Here's a close-up. You can see some of the little zigzaggy legs that have emerged.

Here's one of (what we call) our "microToads." There were significantly fewer than the thousands of eggs and tadpoles we started with. This was taken on June 8. It seems that the toadlets are smaller than the tadpoles. They tended to leave the pond in rainy weather, making an exodus en masse and scattering throughout the yard. We rarely saw them after that. Starting with the thousands of eggs a few months before, we expect that at most we ended up with a few dozen little toads. They, of course, are an important food source themselves - I saw a catbird eating one with the little legs visible outside its beak. It's hard not to feel sad, but that's nature.

Insects

Twelve-spotted skimmer in the regular pond

Common green darner laying eggs in the wildlife pond

Here's a dragonfly larva in the skimmer. It's emerged from the water and probably will soon be transformed into a dragonfly.

July - Note the dragonfly larva on the leaf. For dragonflies, a pond and vegetation are places to raise young.

Here's a good article on protecting your dragonfly larvae when cleaning your pond. The article gives lots of specific tips, but here's the Big Idea: when pruning out or cleaning your pond, let the prunings sit at the edge of the pond or in a bucket for a while to give the larvae a chance to escape back into the water. Those are your future damselflies and dragonflies!