Nature at its Best
This morning Richard and I decided to take Verity and Imogen our 6 and 3 year old daughters for a walk through the copse here at Newbarn Farm. Richard has been supervising and working with a group of children and their carers from the YMCA every Friday morning since the beginning of January. He has set them a project of clearing a path through a wildly overgrown copse inhabitited by all types of wildlife. The intention is to finish with a clearly marked pathway through a beautiful copse literally bursting at the seams with nature's beauty, birdife nesting in the boxes which will be put up with even ones for owls, bat boxes, bumblebee dens, the list goes on but the wildlife I cannot wait to spot are the resident badgers. This copse is riddled with badger sets, this morning we saw their paw prints clearly and found a newly dug opening to one of the sets, the air nearby punctured by the smell of freshly turned earth. Marvellous.
Naturally the walk encouraged a mountain of questions from the girls about the birds and animals who lived in this magical place. Why have the woodpeckers made big holes in the trees? How do they do it? Where are all the badgers now? Is that a pond over there does it have frogs in it? Frogs I thought, early spring I thought, tadpoles I thought. Last year I was too late to collect frogspawn for the children to watch the egg morph into tadpole and eventually to a tailess frog. So after the walk through the copse we made our way down to Mirror Lake where a couple of local anglers were fishing in Devon.
We made our way to the far corner to the stream and sure enough there we found some frogspawn using a fishing net we harvested a little into a bucket for the girls and then meandered on around the edge of this great Devon fishing lake. It was here I spotted at first just one frog and then another and then so many more. The four of us spent ages watching these frogs and trying to find more. 
Many were sitting on the silty bottom by the fast growing bullrushes. And then Richard pulled a few out for the girls to take a proper look. It was when he did this that he saw an unfamiliar sight in the water. He asked me what I thought it was and I was pretty sure it was spawn not frogspawn but toadspawn - long stripes of about 8 inches long with eggs inside, almost like a string of black pearls.
Many were sitting on the silty bottom by the fast growing bullrushes. And then Richard pulled a few out for the girls to take a proper look. It was when he did this that he saw an unfamiliar sight in the water. He asked me what I thought it was and I was pretty sure it was spawn not frogspawn but toadspawn - long stripes of about 8 inches long with eggs inside, almost like a string of black pearls.
Richard has since taken the girls swimming, I chose to stay behind to write this blog (tomorrow I have such a huge work schedule to get through so doing this today will help), a few minutes ago I received a phone call from one of the anglers on Mirror Lake he had hired his tackle today and was ready to return it. Saving my unfinished article, I ventured down the steps from the Holiday Cottages down towards the Fishing in Devon Lakes. On my way I bumped into a gentleman staying in Oakrest (the largest of the self-catering cottages & fishing at Newbarn Farm) with his daughter and husband and his grandchildren. 'Out for an evening stroll' I greeted him with. 'Marvellous, absoultely marvellous' he said, 'the children have been catching frogs down there' he said pointing to Mirror Lake, 'they are so excited!'. 'Toads' I corrected him, 'We did the same this morning'. I agreed with him 'Marvellous'
Let's hope they don't see too many toads in this compromising position as our two did this morning. Some questions are harder to answer then others. Just ask the birds and the bees!
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