A Year in Creatures: March
Interwoven stories from the natural world. Follow the birds and the beasts as they experience the seasons in a rapidly changing landscape.
Common Frog (Rana temporaria)
High up on the moor, on a day when the peat became soft and started to gently squirm, a golden-eyed frog crawled out from under a rock.
She had been there for months, nestled between peat, moss and stone as the world around her slowed, cooled and became still. Outside, gales roared over the hilltops, the first snowfall pittered down, melted away and then the second came, coating the hill in white. Under the stone, the darkness and silence were complete. The temperature fell to zero and stayed there. The little frog barely seemed to breathe.
She had eaten her last meal – a day-flying moth – a long time ago but she wasn’t hungry. About once every couple of seconds, her heart gave a thump. Other than some reflexive twitches, she was motionless.
She had come out only once that winter, when the sun warmed the rock and snowmelt started to trickle into her burrow. Out on the moor, the snow glittered and icicles dripped with a glassy ‘tink, tink, tink’. The frog clambered into a patch of sphagnum and pressed her belly into the saturated moss. Her body absorbed the water like a tissue. Crouched near a tiny bronze pool, she let the sun warm her body and raise her heart-rate then, when it lowered, she returned to her rock and again became still. That was the first and last time.
But the moor was no longer frozen. It bristled with brown heather, patched with crusty snow, and the burns leapt, churned and roared the arrival of spring. In the darkness of her hollow, the frog was starting to stir. Her heart regained its regular, summer rhythm. She opened her eyes, her throat throbbed. She moved one foot and it was a long while until she moved another.
At the rim of the rock she stopped and looked out: there was the white sweep of the higher hill, a blue sky; the scent of snow; the touch of the breeze. Her body responded to every movement of the moor – when it was still, she moved; when it shook, she was still.
Her appetite was starting to stir. Somewhere, in her tadpole memory, was the notion of a pond swarming with insects, crawling with beetles, slugs and snails, with tall rushes all around and patches of pondweed. In a different part of her body there was a quickening, the longing to make eggs.
It wasn’t a decision to go downhill exactly. More an imperative. She forgot about the rock hollow after she left it. Home, now, was the pond. The golden-eyed frog hopped over clumps of saturated moss, crawled sideways through thick stalks of sedge, clambered around the roots of heather. On a pillow of moss she found a fat slug and ate it, her first food since autumn. On a thicket of grass she felt the ground tremble, heard approaching voices and leapt without forethought, landing clumsily a foot downhill and squirming quickly, desperately, into the deep, dank vegetation.
It was night when she came out and the moon made the moor silver. She found another slug and ate it. She heard the light scufflings of a beetle, shot out her tongue and ate that too. During the day she took shelter where she found it. Sometimes bedded into the moss, sometimes underwater, one fearful day she crossed the scent path of a fox, almost drowned out by the thaw. The further down she climbed, the wetter and warmer it became and the more her hunger grew.
She sensed the pond in all other ways before she saw it. Felt the dampness of the air around it and the vibrations of approaching frogs, smelt the earthworms and centipedes winding in the earth, heard the insect hum and the chorus of singing males. At the edge of a garden, she crouched in the lacework of ivy and looked across a close-cropped lawn – there it was, glinting between the rushes. There was the plop of another frog. And there, in the air, was the smell of cat.
What else is happening in the hills?
Snipe are starting to drum. I blummin’ love this. You tend to hear it around dusk, a whirring, whomping sort of sound, like a cross between a ghost and a helicopter. It’s worth camping out to hear it.
Ring ouzels and wheatears return. I haven’t actually seen a Ring Ouzel before but I’d like to. They’re black with a yellow beak, starling-like, but with a moon-shaped white bib on the chest. Wheatears (from white-arse) have a white patch too.
Mountain hare leverets are born. They come into the world fully-furred and open-eyed and are left alone in their form under the care of Chance for most of the day. Mama hare returns in the evening, for suckling.