32 Access all areas

Yesterday I found froglets under the bins and I was perplexed that they’d chosen such a rubbish home. But I spoke too soon. Once I’d spotted the tiny frogs in one place, I began to spot them in several areas of the garden; everywhere there were damp leaves, rotting bark or good, dark cover.

There seems to be a huge number of them in the area of the garden we call The Yard. It’s a work area covered in chippings behind the garage where we have water butts, bags of compost, buckets, old broken bricks and slates, and some rotting tree stumps that formed my stumpery feature before I removed that to create the pond. They must have got word that it’s a good place to be and decided that the massive leap down the steps was worth it.

Leaping down the steps would have been a simple matter of hop and eventually land on the next step. And that’s fine if they never want to return. At the moment, there’s plenty of rain so there are lots of damp and cosy places. But what if we have another summer drought and they need to get back to the pond margins? The steps are smooth-faced and too high for one leap.

So I set about making a frog staircase they could use to get back up to the pond and the rest of the garden. I used some of the old bricks and bark falling off the stumps and stuffed gaps with damp leaves to make inviting stopping-off points.