Trouserpress

Tadpoles are swarming in the garden.

I had a plan to establish a biotope in the garden this year in order to encourage frogs, geckos, skinks and snakes. As is the way with my plans it was smothered by work and hangovers.

Today, my daughter A was all excited: Diverse pots, an old fish tank and an old plastic sand pit (no sand) abandoned in the garden were all full of water … and tadpoles. I seem to have created a bit of a biotope without really doing anything, which is quite an achievement. Or not.

I remember when my sister and I were but kids. My folk came home from the pub of a Saturday lunchtime with a big plastic bag of elvers (baby eels). These are quite the delicacy in Gloucestershire where I grew up.
The Severn is an eel river. The adult eels do their mummy and daddy thing there and the offspring, while still transparent young-lings, embark on a journey right across the Atlantic to the Sargasso where they mature before heading back 7,000km to the Severn to bonk.

Once upon a time, during elver season, all you had to do was dip a tea cup in the Severn and it would come up brimming with elvers. Now of course, the river has been over fished and you need the patience of a coma to catch anything.

Back when I was a kid (a terrible long time ago) the river was still relatively productive, elver wise.

Elver eaters tip bags of the living things into hot butter and fry them. They scoff them with a bucket of local ale and some crusty bread.

On one occasion, some of the elvers my parents brought home slithered onto the kitchen counter instead of nose diving into the hot butter. My sister and I rescued them.

Sis and I dug an improvised pond in the garden and filled it with water. We then deposited the half dozen or so rescued elvers in there assuming they would be dead within the day.

As it happened, we had created a biotope, though it would be decades before I knew what the word meant. The eels thrived and suddenly there were frogs and all sorts of things that we hadn’t invited. There were coelacanth, giant squid, albatrosses, herds of wildebeest that swept majestically across the lawn; the dodo recovered from extinction and pterodactyls roosted in the shrubs.
Sadly, as that summer wore on, the pond dried up and that was that. Now, the other side of the world and an aeon or two later I have got things going again. I think I spotted a mastadon in the mint patch early this morning.
Bleep.

Music: Combinations by Solar Fields; various Frank Zappa. Mood: precarious. Wine: either half full or half empty. Reading: The Book of Dave by Will Self. (A friend of mine was at school with Will Self and there’s a story therefrom that I cannot recount right now.)

Tadpole pics to follow.