Wetlands: primordial nursery

This spring I was privileged to witness a natural phenomenon familiar to us, but rarely observed: the metamorphosis of a creature from aquatic to terrestrial life. It reminded me how important our wetland habitats are. They represent an essential link between the kingdoms of land and water. They are threatened everywhere, and yet embody an essential link in the web of life.

One evening in late April I went for my first nighttime nature walk of the year. The moist, fragrant air summoned me to the riverbank. An eerie whine of amphibious voices arose in the darkness.

But I was more disconcerted by an incessant rustling in the dead leaves of the forest floor. At first I thought it was mice. But whatever the creatures were, they became more abundant as I approached a certain place along the stream where the gently trilling voices were also loudest. Drawing close to the water, I found the chorus almost deafening. And there before me, the river shallows were churning with mating toads.

It is marvellous to see such a quiet, innocuous organism converted into a raw, bewildering force of nature. I felt giddy as I strolled homeward, past that whispering army, invisible in the dark, hopping toward the shore on the same annual pilgrimage it has performed for hundreds of millions of years.

By the end of May when I visited the park with my daughters, those same shallows were seething with countless tiny black polliwogs, their bodies not much larger than a dressmaker's pin. We collected a jar full of them. Supposedly it is possible to raise them by replenishing their water from the river in which they were born. But over the next few weeks they failed to grow. So in late June I released the small survivors, and captured about a dozen more so my daughters could see how the ones in the river had developed over the past month. By now their bodies were almost the size of a dime. That jar of polliwogs travelled North with me, three hours to the cottage.

That weekend the creatures seemed to be at a crucial stage of development. All had sprouted forelegs, and several had hind legs. One that died seemed to have already lost its tail. One of my daughters proposed that they were ready to emerge onto dry land, and we should set up a terrarium for them. I insisted that they would be released instead. We all agreed that my parents should take them home to populate a sizeable garden pond which was new last year.

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