So far, it’s been a February for Frogs. There are concerns that nationally, in Great Britain as a whole, our frogs (mainly Rana temporaria), are having a tough time with habitat loss, pesticide/insecticide use and a relatively new viral disease, ranavirus, all impacting populations.

I hope that this post will reassure readers that at least in our local upland landscape, they seem to be doing just fine. And if not exactly having a whale of a time in Wales (frankly this seems an ironic phrase to use after my recent video of frogs being swallowed alive and whole by a heron), February 2024 has been as close as to frog nirvana as they’ve managed before. Or at least that’s my anthropomorphic assessment.

Pity the poor frogs, or marvel at their clever ecology. I’m not sure that I’d want to focus all our species’ reproductive efforts into an annual orgy of activity lasting just a very few days when we all gathered in a few places for a mating frenzy before, mission accomplished, we dispersed and headed back off into the wider world to live out a largely solitary life for the rest of the year.

But then think of the benefits? No need for complex infrastructures, energy supply, health care, education, politics and leadership – the list goes on and on.

Happy indeed, are (most of) the February frogs in a year like this.

All of this might seem strange after my last post, which left me thinking that the heron was just the first predator switching on to the other side of this annual frog lovefest: one of their few reliable annual food fests. However, a couple of days after witnessing the heron’s efficient frog swallowing, we decided that perhaps we’d inadvertently made things a little easy for the heron.

Over the last few years, we’ve added some marginal Iris around this, our upper pond. And then discovered that several of the most lovely Japanese Iris ensata forms don’t actually like to be too wet through the winter months. Many of the fabulous dedicated Japanese gardens featuring these plants en masse, get flooded in late spring but are left more as damp meadows through the colder months. So we’d removed a few stones from the outlet stream and dropped the water level by perhaps 30 cm.

End result? The heron could wander across most of the pond, without getting its feathers wet. So sensing the frogs’ impending mass mating activity was nigh, I plonked most of these stones back into their summer position. The wet weather in February soon had the desired effect, and the pond level rose significantly. This may be part of the reason why, until the last couple of days, the heron hasn’t returned to our pond. And when we have noticed it, it’s been limited to bank fishing only.

Meanwhile, after checking the pond every morning for signs of spawn on our way to drag our hay big bags over to the sheep, the first clumps were found on the morning of February 3rd. This is earlier than we can ever recall. There were masses of frogs obvious in the pond as well, although they’re sensibly very wary of any movement, immediately diving for cover. I got a few nice video clips of the happy frogs, enjoying their brief moments of communal activity, and after they’d all spotted me move and dived down, decided I’d return later.

I wrote this sentence and then wondered what the current thinking and knowledge is about whether frogs can experience emotions like happiness. I guessed they could, and then found this excellent recent review by Wilson Singleton that begins thus:

“Frogs are often seen as solitary, swamps-dwelling creatures with a limited emotional range—but frogs actually possess a hidden depth of emotion. Research has demonstrated that the emotional lives of frogs may be more complex than previously thought, suggesting that they feel emotions like happiness, fear, and contentedness.”

Also if you follow this link, there’s a wonderful short video about a clearly passionate British herpetologist, Andre Gray, working out of Manchester University, who through determined study over many years, found a new species of South American tree frog, and was eventually able to name it after his granddaughter: Sylvia’s Tree frog. How wonderful!

 

In the evening which turned out to be ideal frog-watching conditions in West Wales – mild, still and only a light drizzle – I headed back down to the pond with a camera, decent mic. and both my LED beanie and powerful CluLite torch. Guessing frogs would be just as easily spooked at night, I made a wide detour to the pond, switched off the CluLite, and twisted the beanie so that the LED, on minimum setting was pointing 90 degrees away from my path of travel. There was little noise – very few cars and no tawny owls calling, as I got closer to the pond. About 20 yards away I heard a strange machinery-type noise which my Beanie-covered ears took to be coming from higher up the hill. I even wondered what or who was operating equipment after dark, but such things happen occasionally around here. Then as I slowly walked close, it became clear that the noise was coming from the pond.

A Welsh frog chorus. In most frog species, including our native common frog, it’s the males that make the most noise, using it as a means to attract the females to the mating location. Some ecologists think that the female frogs might be influenced in their choice of mate by the frog’s song. Or maybe also the colour and size of their air sac. Having counted as best as I could the number of clumps of frogspawn in the following days in the two separate mass rafts beside the pond, I reckoned about 100, and 50,  and assuming roughly equal male/female numbers, this means around 300 frogs were involved in this performance. There’s an interesting simple study here, with a guide to estimating numbers of spawn clumps in a raft, which works out at roughly 78 per square metre, with each clump being roughly oval in size.  In an Irish study, the average clutch size per clump was about 1000 eggs. So that’s potentially 150,000 frog eggs laid in a couple of night’s love-fest. It’s estimated that less than 1 in 50 of these will make it to adulthood.

Operatic in effect, the chorus was complemented by percussive plips and plops as the frogs dipped below the surface and swam around, as light drizzle fell around.

After recording several clips of the sound, with all lights turned away, I moved closer and chanced the beanie LED for some images. It wasn’t bright enough, so I switched to the very bright CluLite beam, and surprisingly the frogs didn’t panic. Many even seemed to swim towards the incredibly bright focal source. Now I could properly survey the scene – tens of frogs sitting just out of the water, eyes wide open, pale air sacs blowing in and out like stretching balloons. I took a couple of slow panning zooms to try to take in this amazing scene, as I tried to manage with two hands the camera, microphone and torch beam in a smooth arc around the pond’s perimeter.

With no warning, as I neared the second mass of spawn to my right, there was an amazing, loud splash, just to my left. I nearly jumped out of my skin: surely a suitably froggy description of my physical reaction. Simultaneously there was the noise of all those frogs diving beneath the surface. In a second, my wits returned and I did a quick torch beam scan of the pond’s margin. Zilch. The culprit had clearly disappeared as silently as it had approached. Which gave me a clue to the sound’s likely cause. An owl, probably a barn owl, flying in silently, and within feet of me and the torch beam, grabbing a poor frog from the pond surface. Clearly, the prospect of easy pickings overruled any caution from my presence, although I guess that it too might have struggled to pick out a human shape from behind such a strong light source.

Thrilled and exhilarated, and figuring that such drama finished the opportunities for the evening – the pond was now silent in the drizzle, I trudged back up the hill. Playing the clip back many times, I can hear other sounds, not obvious at the time, after the dramatic splash. The amazing, diminuendo thrum of disappearing wing feathers. I’m guessing that after an impact at speed into a water surface, the bird probably has to have a surge of effort to keep its momentum going and avoid a crash landing into the water, and this generates this brief, unique sound, for a normally silent assassin. No such sound, but stunning imagery of how an osprey manages this challenge of escaping from a watery hit, in the stunning video below, from Maramedia.

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Just a week later, I was back at the pond, checking for frogs, or bankside signs of frog predation. Of which there were none, save a single small clump of spawn on the bank edge. No eviscerated, half-skinned frogs as we’ve seen in previous years. I noticed how the central, and presumably earliest, clumps of spawn in the largest raft near the pond outflow, were already changing with the black full stops becoming comma-like. Suddenly a very slight movement caught my eye. Next to a bright green leaf amongst the spawn clumps was a roughly 15 mm spikey green structure that had moved. I wondered what it was, and whether it might just be the slight outflow current was moving something inanimate. Then the movements became more obvious. It looked a little like a sea mine and reminded me of caddis larvae cases, but I’d never seen one this shape before – they’re usually more tubular and elongated. Or indeed seen anything like this in the pond before.

Frustratingly I’d left the camera at the house for our drizzly walk down to feed the sheep, so walked back up, and down the hill, and was pleased to see that it was in roughly the same position, but had moved deeper below the surface. With both stills and videos taken, the question was what might be inside. I was sure on a few images you could make out the head and body of an invertebrate larval form that emerged from the ‘mine’. But was it vegetarian, or was it eating a developing tadpole? I put the find up on iSpot and as always the eagle-eyed community was quickly on the case, and giving me a clue. I think it might be the larval form of the Brown China-mark moth, Elophila nymphaeata, which we always find in numbers around this pond in early summer.

But there are differences of opinion. Some think it is a caddis!

Apparently, the early larval stages of the moth develop in mines within the leaves of its favoured food plants. Then later on it leaves the mine and builds itself a protective home held together with silk fibres it produces from which it continues to feed, on plant material, over the winter until it pupates. The small group of China moths are one of the few families of moths in the UK to have such an aquatic larval life stage.

Addendum: I’ve recently been sent images by the keen naturalist sister of a recent garden visitor of a very similar Limnephilus. sp caddis case. As well as more images of actual China moth plant-based larval cases. Both of which point to this spiky structure being produced by a caddis fly larva. Possibly L. flavicornis, and here for more, since it was found in a pond. I’m grateful for all the help on iSpot and elsewhere with this identification.

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On a dreary Valentine’s Day morning, at least a second wave of frogs visited the pond overnight and laid spawn at the far, Northern end. Another 15 clumps, in a spot which hasn’t been used for many years. We’ve also achieved something that very rarely, if ever, happens here. And rarely did in our previous garden in Bristol – another reflection of the warm winter, I guess.

Having not just a single Camellia flower open by this date, but several flowers, of 4 different cultivars: The gorgeous AGM cultivar Camellia japonica ‘Nuccio’s Cameo’, above.

C. ‘Water lily’.

C. japonica ‘High, Wide ‘n’ Handsome’.

The other we were given as a gift early on, and we’ve lost the name.

I don’t know if I’d plant any of them now, given our current preference for insect-friendly flowers. The colours of many aren’t very subtle and often are wrecked by frosts and die horribly to mushy brown. But this year, with the generally mild and wet conditions, they do lift the spirits, and we wouldn’t want to be without them.

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Frankly, the garden hasn’t looked its best recently, although the snowdrops still manage to look lovely under grey skies and rain. Fortunately, all of our visitors to date have managed to time their moments to at least being dry, and the lucky few have seen bursts of sunshine which very quickly get the Crocus flowers opening. It’s been a real delight to count well over a hundred Crocus flowers dotted around our upper hay meadow, after many years of scattering collected seed. And working out when to remove the sheep from this meadow – January 1st.

Whether they’ll ever produce the extensive purple haze I had in mind when I started spreading them in this way remains to be seen. But this year, despite the gloom and damp, I even spotted a honeybee had discovered one at the top of the field, so seed formation and drop, in situ, might continue the process in years to come and save me the effort.

When creating and photographing a garden there’s always a tendency not to capture what the grotty areas look like, early on. Which, with hindsight, is a shame, since the enjoyable process and timescale records of development are then missing those very early phases of progress.

So I’m including a few photos of the developing Malus and Sorbus copse, which for the first year ever has snowdrops popping up all over it, albeit in small numbers for now. Daffodils will follow. Not that you can really see them in these images – but that reflects the point I’ve just made.

So much to lift the spirits, along with our lovely visitors as we hope for better conditions and ever more light ahead. Our PV inverter shows we’ve already hit a peak power, albeit briefly, of 3.4 KW. Which is not far off being 90% of the maximum possible output of the system. The problem is that, unlike last February when we reached 188 KWH by the end of the month, this year we’ve achieved just 40 KWH so far. The equivalent of that maximum intensity of light hitting us for just 12 hours of the first 12 days of the month.

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For my musical interlude, I’m including this wonderful piece by Chopin, played beautifully by Beatrice Rana. ( A curious synchronicity of surname, given the emphasis on frogs in this post). This is Étude No.7 in C-sharp Minor, from 12 Études, Op. 25. This second set of Études was published in 1837, and dedicated to Franz Liszt’s mistress, Marie d’Agoult, although quite why, isn’t clear. I don’t know who had the idea for the video to accompany Italian pianist Rana, playing on this recording. Initially, I wasn’t sure about the artifice of plonking a piano on a beach, however the music and playing are superb. Ad I suppose the music has a wave-like progression and form, building in intensity, before crashing over one.

Perhaps a bit like the saga I discuss below. And in its C-sharp minor key, suitably melancholic.

 

This probably makes a good finale for readers of a sensitive disposition to stop reading at this point.

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I can’t finish, given the time of year, without mentioning my snowdrop ‘Whelm’.

Named by me back in January 2020, when I first wrote about the novel disease emerging in China, and speculating whether by the time the flowers had finished in about 6 weeks, the world would have moved on.

However, I feared this would not be the case.

Given my scientific background, and my decision not to have the much hyped ‘safe and effective’ vaccines, I’ve followed the unfolding story of Covid’s likely origins and the development and mass use of the novel action vaccines with great interest, along with the largely one-sided political and media coverage of events. I’ve sought out far more knowledgeable and intelligent people than me, watched them speak, and if I’ve been impressed by how they come across and their message, bought and read many books. And many scientific papers.

Early on, I also bought Sir Jeremy Farrar’s take on the developing saga, as a key scientific influencer not just of the UK government, but also as someone who helped to in manipulate the narrative developed to be pushed out to the public at large, globally. He’s since moved from being head of the enormous Wellcome Trust, with all of its pharmaceutical industry financing, to being the chief scientist of the WHO, and the diplomatic immunity afforded to him with that job (funny that would be a valued or necessary perk?) As well as a life in Geneva. I wrote, in not very glowing terms, about the tone and thrust of his book, in January 2022, under the title “Inconvenient Curiosity”.

I’ve increasingly formed the opinion that the Covid ‘pandemic’ and its management, will go down in human history as one of the greatest, most arrogantly driven, and multifaceted crimes against a major part of the world’s population, that has ever occurred. And because of this complexity, and internationally extending multi-disciplinary tentacles, it’ll likely never be completely solved or understood. Nor will key players ever be brought to justice. There will always be someone else to push the blame onto.

But even my gradually forming sense of outrage has been trumped by 2 short recent video interviews.

The first involved Dr Peter MacCulloch, who was being asked about his own co-authored meta-analysis paper on fatalities linked to contemporary mRNA products. About 20 minutes into the discussion he references a recent serious Japanese researchers’ medical paper. I followed the link to the paper myself, after first genning up on exactly how PET scans work: very simply a dye is injected into patients’ bloodstreams to show differential and unusual patterns of dye take-up by cells working abnormally. Often the doctors are looking for indications of altered metabolism pointing to cancerous changes, or in the case of the heart muscle, abnormal metabolism indicating likely heart muscle damage. You can watch the interview here, and decide what to make of this eminent (though now disowned by the establishment) American cardiologist/physician. About 20 minutes in, this is what he says, transcribed by me below:

19:56
“And then we also have this report that’s so interesting by Nakahara and colleagues regarding abnormalities in cardiac positron emission tomography (PET – sic). There are about 700 vaccinated, and 300 unvaccinated (patients) getting PET scans for other reasons (my highlight), but they had very good cardiac imaging and it was striking where in virtually every vaccinated person, the myocardium shifted from preferring free fatty acids (the heart muscle’s normal preferred energy source – sic) to preferring glucose as a metabolic substrate and this is tagged with 18 floral dioxide glucose (FDG). Now when I order a cardiac PET scan in my practice, I’m looking for an ischaemic zone of myocardium (indicating a lack of blood supply in an area of the heart muscle, often caused by a clot in an artery supplying that part of the heart muscle -sic).

Here in these scans, the entire left ventricle actually took on, in almost every one of the 700 vaccinated persons, the appearance of an ischaemic left ventricle. Whereas the 300 unvaccinated people had normal PET scans, with no FDG uptake. I looked at
the paper carefully and the only thing that makes sense to me is that there may be microthrombi or just red blood cell hemagglutination which is well described as being capable of being caused by the CVID spike protein. And this is happening in the small capillaries of the heart to create these metabolic changes. And this was seen up to 6 months after the vaccine. So we have to posit that it may not be all myocarditis (the subject of his research paper – sic), it may be a form of metabolic cardiomyopathy or other abnormalities. But it appears to be common, and we may just be seeing the
tip of the iceberg.”

Hmmm. What to make of that, Julian? Given the now-acknowledged significant rises in excess mortality seen in many countries around the world in 2021, 2022, 2023. Remember most countries were hit by the worst phase and variant in 2020. And in particular, the recent surge in cardiovascular-related deaths which was highlighted very recently in this link by the British Heart Foundation. Including heart attacks, thrombo-embolic episodes and strokes.

The other remarkable interview was with a courageous self-employed funeral director/ embalmer from Milton Keynes. He discusses a completely different form of rubbery white clot which he and his co-worker have been removing from the blood vessels of cadavers he’s preparing for embalming during the years since 2021. (Along with identical findings by embalmers in other countries). They’ve never seen such clots before in many years of experience. And they’ve been finding them in roughly 25% of these poor people, who’ve often died young, and suddenly. You might reflect, as I did, on how he’s had no luck at all in raising this as an issue of major concern with either his local coroner or with national authorities, or even the police.

Listen to this man, and wonder as I did, is he a plausible witness? Has he concocted the whole story, including the physical examples and photographs of such abnormal clots? What does he stand to gain from sticking his head above the parapet with such public statements? Or lose? And what on earth does one make of his reported experience, (around 11 minutes into the video for those with a shorter attention span) of being ‘gaslighted’ from the highest level, for raising his concerns. “We follow government policy” was the only snappy 4-word email response, which he eventually received., from the senior coroner of England

Overwhelmed? Possibly, but not in the way I first imagined, 4 years ago.

I hope the fact that ‘Whelm’ doesn’t seem to be one of the most vigorous snowdrops is, perhaps, a sign that this saga can’t get any bleaker. Or blacker.

Though I’m not holding my breath.