For three weekends running we had named storms sweeping in over Britain, causing widespread flooding, including here in the Calder Valley, so the weekend before last, when it turned calmer and milder, we started thinking when would the frogs reappear in the pond. Right on cue, later in the day we spotted a few males, waiting for the females to arrive.
By the end of the week there were about twenty clumps of frogspawn in the sunnier, shallower corner of the pond which is always the favourite with them.
They’d finished for this year by the 12th March, when I took this photograph. Down at the bottom left corner of the clumps, a male smooth newt was performing his tail-wafting dance for the female. The mating season for newts goes on for weeks.