by Bill Oddie
Of course, the Grey Squirrels will eat anything that isn’t meant for them!
Done it again
Well, I’ve done it again! I allude to a blog full of laughter and lasciviousness and end up writing about garden wildlife. Next time, next time; I promise.
Are you sitting comfortably?
But before I migrate south for a few days to the Isles of Scilly… The other morning I was having brekky in our local tea-room. At a nearby table, a Hampstead mum was reading a ToyTown book to her toddler-aged son. He wasn’t toddling then, he was sitting and listening intently, and I admit so was I. Imagine my surprise when mum showed a picture to the boy and said: ‘Look, Noddy’s got a satnav!’ Unfortunately, mother and child departed, plus the book, and I hadn’t the nerve to call after her: ‘Noddy’s got a satnav! Is that true?’
I hurried home, not certain which was shocking me most, that Noddy’s car had had a 21st-century makeover, or that I’d started hearing voices about updating children’s stories. As luck would have it, my wife, Laura, writes for children’s television. She would not only know about such modernisations, but may even be responsible for some of them.
Disaster
It probably wasn’t the first question she expected to hear when I got home: ‘Laura, does Noddy have a satnav?’ She had to think about it. Then she made a pronouncement that I felt had just a tinge of defensiveness about it, almost as if I had insulted the integrity of her profession. ‘I am sure Noddy doesn’t have a satnav. We don’t change traditional characters. Of course, Bob the Builder has a mobile. And in one series he did have a laptop, but that was a disaster.’
I bet it was. And as for Winnie-the-Pooh getting hooked on World of Warcraft… And have you seen Angelina Ballerina’s Facebook page?
Blog two
Frogs’ Porn
Who’s been eating my frogspawn?
I know it is only a small pleasure, but a few weeks ago I was so happy when one morning I pottered into my garden and discovered that the smallest and shallowest of my five ponds contained not one but two tightly clustered dollops of frogspawn. I was not only delighted but also surprised, since I was yet to see a frog in the garden this spring. However, a few minutes later, a telltale plop and ripple revealed there were in fact two frogs in the slightly larger pond about half a metre away. I must have overlooked them, which is understandable since that pond is not only larger but also much deeper. By the way, if you’d prefer more precise dimensions, the spawn pond is about a metre long and a couple of inches deep, while the larger one is maybe a centimetre more in length, but is a veritable garden Loch Ness, with a depth of at least a foot. While I’m at it – for the completists among you – my third pond is perched in the rockery like a diminutive mountain lake, and, like many real mountain lakes, is devoid of wildlife. Number four is ready-made, moulded and rather dull. It is adjacent to the bird feeders and is consequently used mainly for drinking and bathing. By the birds, that is. The waters are continually agitated by a small fountain, which sprays out unpredictably and randomly, but intentionally as I have amended the ‘spout’ by fixing a small piece of hollow wood over it, which is riddled with holes and therefore expels water all over the place, especially when the whole fragile arrangement is knocked skew-whiff by a clumsy pigeon (is there any other kind?).
The big pond
Finally there is the ‘big pond’ at the end of the garden. This used to be the one I dutifully dug out when we first moved into the house about 30 years ago. The previous owners had built a raised concrete patio in about the daftest available site which – due to a canopy of vast trees in surrounding gardens – received no sun whatsoever. It would also have been a pretty lousy place for a flowerbed. One might have thought that the same shivering shadows that prevented anything blooming or blossoming would also have deterred anyone wishing to bask, read or snooze in a deckchair. To be honest, when I first saw the supposed patio it didn’t look as if anything living had visited it for years, except the snails, centipedes and woodlice that lurked or scuttled under the pile of old plant pots.
But I knew what I was going to do with it. I had never had a garden pond. In fact, I’d never really had what you might call a garden. Now that I had, I was overwhelmed by a pioneering spirit. Anyone who can remember the day they dug their own pond will no doubt recall the many emotions. The exhilaration, the anticipation, the stress, the throbbingly aching limbs from the digging, and the ever-worsening feelings of exhaustion and nausea that come from being hunched over for however long it takes to create a hole long, wide and deep enough. In my view, it should take a day. It might take less, but it must not take more. It is a matter of pride to be able to announce: ‘I’ve built a garden pond!’, whereupon you will be asked: ‘How long did it take you?’ To which the imperative answer is a nonchalant: ‘Oh about a day. Well, less than a day actually. About a morning.’
Your audience will be impressed and doubly so when you amend the time scale to: ‘Well less than a day actually, not much more than a morning.’ Hopefully this will encourage, challenge or indeed oblige them to have a go in their garden. If they do that’s great, but if they don’t, it is your next duty to make them feel guilty. ‘It’ll take less than a morning, honestly. Garden ponds are really important. Not just for frogs. All sorts of things.’
Hosepipes ahoy!
My big pond was a major feat of engineering, involving the wielding of two sledgehammers, the gouging out of several weighty bucketfuls of London clay, and the laying of a butyl liner (butyl is rubbery waterproof stuff), and the final filling up process (no hosepipe bans in those days) which was carried out at least three times, until I finally got the water level level, if you see what I mean. It was a lot of work, requiring a degree of expertise, which I didn’t have, but it was indeed basically completed within one day, albeit the final filling had to be conducted after dark by the glow of a couple of garden lamps. I also left the back door open so that music from my hi-fi drifted out which, coupled with the burbling hosepipe and the flashing lighting (I fixed the dodgy wiring later in the week), combined to create a passably impressive ‘son et lumière’.
There is, alas, a slightly ironical postscript to the story of my big pond.
It is still there, but not in its original form. The butyl lining lasted for a couple of decades until it started to leak and the water began to seep away into the clay. I immediately resolved to repair or replace. However, after 20 odd years, the butyl lining wasn’t the only thing that had deteriorated. So had I. My sledgehammer and digging days were over. I had by then created my several little ponds. I’d dug one, but for the others I had used those moulded plastic substitutes you can buy at the garden centre. Once put in place (I recommend a spirit level) and furnished with a few aquatics, they rapidly attracted a modicum of wildlife, most notably, of course, the frogs. So the question now was: how big a moulded pond can I get? The answer was ‘flipping enormous’. To get one home in a car, to quote Jaws: I was gonna need a bigger car! Or a smaller pond. Hence the size of my new big pond was dictated by what I could get into my Renault Clio.
Prefers full sunshine
It was a bit sad placing a plastic pond in the hole left by what had been a ‘natural’ one, but by the time I had disguised the edges with rocks and branches and put a few little pots of aquatics on the ledges, it looked reasonably authentic. A slightly more powerful fountain than I had on the ‘bird-feeder pond’ added a classic running water sound, just like on the meditation CDs, while the permanent cascade almost qualified it as a ‘water feature’, like Alan Titchmarsh talks about. But of course this wasn’t a ‘water feature’, it was a ‘wildlife pond’. A title it totally merits, except for one thing. At no stage during its first two decades as a natural pond, nor during the several years since it went plastic, has my big pond attracted anything that could be judged to be wildlife! There are probably a few woodlice under the damper logs, but I have never ever seen anything truly aquatic, either in or on the water. There is, of
course, an obvious reason. Just as a corner that never gets the sun is a pretty useless place to put a patio, or a flower bed, it is also a pretty unproductive site for a pond!
Dollops!
On the other hand, a small shallow pond, created by sacrificing a little patch of lawn that is in the sun almost all day, is ‘frog paradise’ and ‘spawn city’. The double dollop was only the start. Next morning, there were two or three more portions; the next day the quantity had doubled, even if the frog count hadn’t. Most springs there is one, usually rainy and mild, night, when it seems that all the frogs in a particular region feel the primal urges rising in their froggy loins and set off to their ancestral mating ground, or pond, where they indulge in what can only be called an orgy. It is not romantic, and it doesn’t even look enjoyable, as males grab and grapple with females, until some of them are literally suffocated or drowned. One is tempted to comment: ‘I’ve heard of a bit of rough but this is ridiculous!’ Slightly disturbing though it be, I rejoice at the yearly gang-bang when my littlest pond is one day a seething cauldron of amphibian lust, and the next morning a very large helping of tapioca. This year, however, it wasn’t like that.
The spawn bank
Or rather, there was only half of the equation. I never did see more than two or three frogs, and the only coupling was a soft and sensual demonstration of the request: ‘be gentle with me’. And yet every day the spawn bank got bigger and bigger, until the pond was quite literally full! At this point, the frogs decided their work was at an end – as well they might – and I have not seen them, or any others since.
The circle of life
What I did witness was the beginning of one of the few life cycles that, as they say, every schoolboy (and girl) knows, and has probably witnessed. It wasn’t long before several of the spawn clusters began the process, as the little black dots got a bit less little, and acquired a smidgeon of a tail shape. One particularly sunny morning stimulated the first wrigglers, and gave me a hint of what a tureen of life and energy my pond would eventually become, not to mention the hopping hordes of froglets that would invade my lawn.
It was going so well
Then something puzzling happened. They all disappeared. Dots, tiny tadpoles and spawn. The lot. All gone. No, I exaggerate. In fact, after swishing my hand gently in the weeds and water I disturbed one single tiny tadpole. I caught it in a cup and plopped it into a small tank along with a dozen others that I was rearing as exhibits to entertain my grandchildren. And myself. As I did so, it struck me that the ones I had rescued were still alive and well. Whatever had happened to the others, hadn’t happened to them. But what had happened? I rummaged on the internet, but basically only confirmed what I had figured out for myself. Was it infertility, or was it what one might call lack of manpower? Male frogs don’t impregnate the female and leave her to lay eggs, job done. She produces the spawn, and he then has to do the rounds, fertilising as much of it as he can. I sympathised with the male in my garden. There was a veritable spawn mountain, and possibly only him to fertilise it. Maybe he ran out of juice, as it were, or energy. I would not have blamed him, but the evidence didn’t fit the theory.
I had noticed that some of the dots in the eggs had turned milky white and were presumably dead. That was most likely the result of a couple of days of late cold weather, which even included snow. In addition, some of the ‘jelly’ was limp and lifeless and could have been infertile, or rather unfertilised. But by no means all. Out of a pond full of spawn, and thousands of potential tadpoles, some casualties are to be expected, but there was no sign of any escalating epidemic or impending massacre. The depletion I had seen so far seemed perfectly natural. Until that morning, when everything disappeared. Except my little sample colony. They were fine in their tank. Whatever had got everything else hadn’t got them. Surely that meant it was neither freeze nor disease.
An acquired taste
Was it possible that the whole pondful had been eaten? Or should that be drunk? To be honest I have never really thought of tadpoles as food or prey, but think of them as aquatic worms or slugs, or indeed small frogs, and they must surely get gobbled up by, for example, birds. I had noticed a queue of the usual suspects lurking and lunging by or even in the pond. Magpies and Jays were circumstantially guilty, but the only species I actually saw grab a ‘taddy’ and devour it was a Robin! No doubt quite a number slid down into that plump little scarlet tummy, but surely not all of them! And what about the glutinous globules? Imagine pecking at a pile of transparent jelly. It would take birds a week to get through it. Or had there been an enemy within, under the water? I don’t think so. I keep no fish and I have never seen a newt in the garden.
So whodunnit?
A possible clue awaited me down by the shed. I confess I have a bit of an aversion to throwing away household chattels and furniture. This isn’t for environmental reasons. I could, of course, take it to the recycling centre. However, I would rather incorporate suitable items into the decor of the garden, as it were. Thus, there are a number of mirrors and picture frames secreted among the foliage, and a lilac tree is decorated with kitchen utensils, such as knives and forks, cheese graters and whisks. Recently, a bamboo beaded door curtain became redundant and, since it was already organic and indeed almost ‘jungly’, I fixed it up by the garden shed where it hung down and masked the dustbin, while also looking as if it shrouded a mysterious portal through the fence into a wild and magic land. Or something like that. Anyway, I liked it. But someone or something else didn’t.
Temper, temper
Already mourning the desecration at the pond, I was now further appalled by an act of blatant vandalism. My beaded curtain had not only been pulled down to the ground, every single strand had been pulled off, and most of them were twisted and tangled, as if they had been shaken in a fit of temper, violent enough to also leave a scattering of bamboo and beads all round the shed. But though vanishing tadpoles puzzled me, destructive delinquency didn’t. I knew instantly who was guilty. This was the work of Foxy.
There’s gratitude for you
Heaven knows, I love to see urban Foxes in the garden, but it has to be said that our local representative is a bit of a hooligan. In recent times, he has chewed a gnome in half, beheaded a plaster pig, disembowelled a plastic Lapwing and pulled one of my water pumps out of the pond and gnawed at the flex. I trust he is grateful that I apprehended him before he electrocuted himself, but obviously not, or he wouldn’t have destroyed my beaded curtain. Or eaten my tadpoles.
Dining at Oddie’s
OK, I am not 100 per cent certain. I wouldn’t risk taking him to court. But I have now heard from a few other people who have witnessed such a thing, and it does makes sense physically, as it were. Think of Foxy taking a wander through the Hampstead gardens, feeling peckish, imagining the well-healed householders picking at their Weight Watchers vol-au-vents and sipping their Pinots. ‘I could do with a nibble,’ he’s thinking. ‘Nothing too heavy. And a wee sip of pond water would go down nicely. I know, Oddie’s.’ So he slinks across a couple of lawns, leaps up on the Ivy-covered fence, trots along the top as daintily as a tightrope walker, and leaps off into Oddie’s. Only to find himself trussed up in a bamboo curtain, which he can only disentangle himself from by tearing it to shreds. Not a lot of things spook old Foxy, but for a second there he thought he’d been trapped in some kind of net, and – own up – he panicked. ‘Blimey, I need a stiff drink. Oddie’s pond water! Not out of that horrible pretend pond; you can taste the plastic. The littlest pond. He fills that from the water butt. Pure rainwater, none more natural.’
From a sip to a slurp
So he takes a sip, and finds his nose covered in jelly! Maybe he’s not sure what it is and tastes it and quite likes it. Or perhaps in Fox world frogspawn is a bit of a delicacy. My pond is like a huge bowl of caviar, or an enormous dish of tapioca or sago. There are little black wriggly things in there, too, not much meat on them, but quite an intriguing flavour. ‘Reminds me of fr
og. Oh, of course, silly me – frogspawn. An acquired taste, but – you know what? – I think I have just acquired it.’
Whereupon, he slurps the lot.
Or was it?
Well, that’s my theory, and I am sticking to it. The better news is that the tiny tadpole team that I decanted into the fish tank are doing fine, and some are looking distinctly froggish. And another glimmer of good news. Maybe Foxy is innocent after all, because I have just seen another possible culprit crouching on a garden chair and swiping his paws at the tadpole tank, which he won’t get into ’cos I have put a lid on it. ‘Come back for more, have you, Timmy?’ Next door’s cat! I know he had my Blue Tits, so I bet he thought: ‘I’ll have his tadpoles too!’
And I can’t even do what I usually do to him. Flippin’ hosepipe ban!
Blog three
Whodunnit?
Suspense
OK, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Six weeks since my last blog. Six weeks waiting and wondering if my few remaining tadpoles have survived. How could I keep you in suspense like this? Don’t I realise the pain of unrequited anticipation? Yes, yes; I do, I do. I felt the same about the next episode of Homeland, and The Bridge, and Manchester City’s horribly inevitable last-minute goal. I even felt a twinge of tension before Pudsey, the dog, was quite rightly acclaimed as the most talented thing on television. And talking of television, I can’t even use work as an excuse for not blogging. Well, not working on telly anyway, or doing anything I get paid for, well not yet anyway, though I am owed a small fistful of fees by the BBC and Channel 5 and half a dozen theatres. But I have been very, very busy.
Oh yeah! Doing what?
Well, there were those half-dozen gigs – oh ok, ‘shows’, talks, ‘evenings with’ type things. The ‘with’ being me and my longtime BBC TV producer Stephen Moss. Well, he isn’t just mine; he’s done lots of stuff on his own too. Anyway, we treat the audience to an evening of the ‘best of’ wildlife clips from over 10 years’ worth of my own natural history series, introduced by and garnished with anecdotes and revelations. It is called ‘Bill Oddie Unplucked’, which means nothing but is further evidence that I wish I had been a musician (as in ‘Unplugged’, geddit?) It went rather well and we will probably do it again, so watch this space, as they say. So, that is a week ‘on the road’ accounted for, plus a couple of days recovering for me, while Stephen wrote another couple of books, no doubt now available from the appropriate website or even a real bookshop.