The golden orfe with the amorous frog.

Get orfe, you toad!

THIS time last year we were awash with frogs. They were everywhere, hopping and crawling around the garden by the score, and at night they did their best to keep us awake with such a chorus of creaking and croaking that we couldn't wait for them to finish their business in the pond and head off back into the woods and fields where they had come from.

Perhaps its something to do with the weather, or maybe it's just a bad year for frogs, but for some reason we have very few this spring. In fact, one lonely solitary male frog is all I found when I was cleaning out the pond.

He was evidently in an amorous mood, and in the absence of females he had caught himself a fish (a golden orfe, pictured) and had his arms wrapped around its midriff with his thumbs locked together in order to hold on tightly.

Male frogs are not particularly discerning and will clutch at anything within reach, in the hope that it might turn out to be a female. I've seen them wrap themselves around sticks and leaves, and even around each other, but I never knew one to successfully catch a fish.

This fish was actually badly crushed by the embrace of its would-be suitor. It did manage to swim away once I had freed it, although it slowly sank to the bottom and lay there on its side. The frog gave me a long, cold stare.

I walked down the the lake and looked in the shallows, thinking that there might be more frogs to be found. There were none. A heron flapped heavily out of the reeds – perhaps he has most of them eaten.

It's nice to have frogs around. Well, I think so anyway, and so did the Anglo Normans, who are thought to have introduced this animal into Ireland, perhaps as a food item. There isn't much meat on them, but then again they do look after themselves and so whatever food value they do have costs nothing. And they turn up at known locations in large numbers (except this year) at a time of year when food, in the days before supermarkets, would have been in short supply.

There is another theory, that students of Trinity College in Dublin brought a few frogs over from the United Kingdom, and that they spread over the entire country from there.

Even if they aren't strictly native, they are still useful animals to have around the place. A few frogs in the garden will consume large numbers of pests. They also sit very comfortably in the food chain, and are snacked upon by many other creatures.

Foxes probably account for a good many. Badgers will eat them too, and even hedgehogs have been known to tuck into a frog or two. We already mentioned the heron, which is by no means the only bird partial to such an easy meal. I've witnessed crows catching and killing a frog, and many water birds will happily swallow them down at all stages of their life. We even had a blackbird feasting on the tadpoles that were swarming at the edge of the pond.

In times past frogs were put to good use. Is it toothache that you have? Well, why not pop a frog in your mouth for 10 minutes or so, and see if that ancient remedy really works? For the treatment of sore eyes, get a friend to lick a frog and then to lick your eyes – never known to fail. It would need to be a good friend, I think.

Is it, I wonder, just here that the frogs have failed to turn up?

 

* Story from Country File, a weekly column in The Connaught Telegraph print edition