It is remarkable how the signal to breed hardwired into the brains of toads brings the creatures to the ponds at Lightwood in such numbers. Yet thereafter one is struck by their almost total invisibility. Since the April frenzy involving perhaps 10,000 adults I have seen one. And that was in Staffordshire.
Yet those adults have left us a multitude of offspring, which now form a long winding oil-slick of primal life in the top pond at Lightwood. The differing depths of water in the four pools have an inbuilt Goldilocks benefit: whatever the seasonal conditions, one of them will meet the needs of the hour, and in our drought state it is the toads in the deepest water that flourish.
In order to get on close terms I had to don waders (leaking, as it turned out) and stand with water to my ribs. If there was some disturbance to the masses, there was at least a mutual exchange, because I slowly realised that the pins-and-needles sensation all over one submerged hand was me feeding tadpoles on dead skin.
A singleton may be basic: a dark blobbed body half the length of a diaphanous tail, with two pinhole eyes and a pale-rimmed mouth. Yet the simplicity was suggestive. At times I could see the thick-lipped jaws of a groper, a conger eel’s head, a dugong’s precise nose profile or, from the rear, a sea snake wafting through coral.
En masse the tadpoles were a different order of imaginative encounter. Some mysterious mechanism – hunger possibly – caused the shoal to wind onwards and entwine a rock or other source. They would become a soft jellied soup, thousands deep, quivering and black, while watching multitudes plunge urgently into the murk reminded me of herring schools, or spermatozoa journeying towards life.
There were touches of death, including a large diving beetle larva scavenging among them. Now and then there were tadpole corpses in the water column and, at the surface, a confetti of St Mark’s flies, whose spent wriggling bodies were engulfed in tadpole mouths. Yet the overwhelming emotion generated by this molten lava of immature life was a joy in the presence of such abundance.
