I received this email from Ronda Green recently and I asked her if I could share it with you. I just love hearing about other peoples experiences with frogs in their backyards.
We put in a small frog pond a couple of years ago, with some water weeds collected from the creek and a bit of nardoo. We surrounded it on three sides with Dianella and other dense low vegetation, partly for the appearance, partly for other wildlife, and partly to deter cane toads which seem to like more open ground.
On wet warm nights we often see and hear the ornate burrowing frog calling while floating in the water. We also have spotted marsh frogs, green tree frogs and common sedge frogs using it, plus freshwater snails that came in with the water weed.
We bought six native Pacific blue-eye fish to control mosquito larvae without eating tadpoles but they don’t seem to have survived (perhaps taken by birds). There are other frogs on the property that don’t seem to have discovered the pond yet.
The first pond we tried to make before this was done mixing bondcrete with cement, overlain on sand and plastic sheeting, with some natural local rock embedded into the concrete. Then we coated all with bonddcrete as well but it still leaked. This time we bought a ready-made pond from Bunnings and put rocks around the edge, overlapping in an attempt to disguise the black plastic. Doesn’t look quite as good but working well for the frogs.
Posted in Daily Frog Life. Permalink for this post: permalink.
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