Tadpoles

I love frogs.

When we first bought this house with its barren yard of weeds and a few dying native trees we were excited rather than daunted by the challenge of creating a lush oasis. 23 years later we have that oasis.  The trees have provided food, shade and leaf litter to attract wild life. Our yard now provides refuge to bird life, lots of lizards, insects, spiders, the occasional possum and to my delight frogs
We noticed that the frogs arrived soon after we began planting and watering the yard. Who knows where they came from, but soon we had some  rather large green frogs sitting on our windowsills eating insects. Every so often the population would drop, presumably when we have had visiting snakes but we noticed a gradual increase in numbers.
When the kids were younger we tried raising tadpoles. We tried to be responsible about it, only getting tadpoles from the local area and only taking them from puddles that were drying up. We had limited success but what I really wanted was for frogs to choose our yard to breed in. We installed a pond quite a few years back. We found we had to put fish in and maintain fish very quickly unless we wanted mosquitoes breeding. The fish population grew quickly and I put in water plants and lots of rocks with spaces under them to create a haven for frogs and we would frequently see frogs around the pond, but no tadpoles. After cyclone Yasi last year the pond developed a crack, drained and we lost all the fish.
I still wanted the pond, so I bought a liner to re-establish it. I had kept a bucket of sludge from the bottom of the old pond and all the rocks had a healthy coating of slime so it didn't take long for the pond to balance out,  and I noticed one day the pond was alive with mosquito larvae, so I bought new fish. It was hard getting any that I wanted. The cyclone had caused a large number of ponds and aquariums to lose fish, so there was very little to chose from. I wanted guppies but had to settle for mollies. They cleaned up the mossies in  a day and they looked to be doing well but within a fortnight I had lost all but one. We lost one in the first day but then had a sudden drop of temperature overnight. At the same time as I was restoring the pond we had a large coconut tree removed from the yard and this had effectively shaded the pond. Now the pond was getting afternoon sun and the algae was going mad so I decided that I would replace the mollies with goldfish in an effort to keep down the slime. 6 months later and one by one I was seeing the goldfish die. At the same time we were getting a number of very emaciated toads dead in the pond. We suspect that the toads either had a virus or more likely were eating the ratsak that our neighbour was putting out in his shed and they were coming to us for water. We then suspect that the goldfish were nibbling on the dead toads and ingesting the toad poison. Eventually we had no goldfish left, so this time I went back to guppies. The goldfish hadn't really solved the algae problem and I still really wanted tadpoles and I knew that I'd have no chance with goldfish.
Jump forward another 2 months. I noticed that a water spider had moved in and that we were still getting toad fatalities but the guppies were doing fine. One day we noticed a clump of eggs. A week later I walked by the pond and thought that I saw a guppy swimming strangely. I looked again - it was a tadpole. I looked closer, there were at least 30 tadpoles in there.  I was concerned that they were toad tadpoles, but after some research I decided that they were most likely frogs. I was overjoyed. Last night as I went to water the plants there were two tiny baby frogs sitting on the papyrus, still with a remaining stub of tail, still mostly brown, but definitely froglets. Success at last. Our pond is a worthy breeding spot.