10-Mar Spring Awakening

Amphibians, Reptiles and Fish

March usually sees the common frog in amplexus i.e. the smaller male gripping the larger female under the armpits with his nuptial pads. These pads are small, dark, rough patches of skin on his forelimbs. There is no great courtship to talk of with the male gripping pretty well anything, even a human finger, once excited by a female’s presence. Shortly after the eggs are laid, they swell and float to the surface. Many small garden ponds are used for breeding and often cannot support the large number of eggs that are laid in them.

Two or three weeks after the first common frogs start breeding, toads repeat the same mating ritual, moving towards their favoured ponds. This is usually in the evening and commonly in wet conditions. They seem to prefer deeper ponds, whereas newts seem to need emergent vegetation around the edges. It is now the time when toads cross the roads and, in certain places, drivers are warned with signs to take care.

March is also a surprisingly good month to see reptiles. Even terrapins may be seen at the edges of water bodies such as Lonsdale Road reservoir. The reason for this is that at this time of year most reptiles are sluggish. They leave their hibernacula, tempted out by the sunshine, soak it up and then return below ground. When basking in the sun they are slow to move off and consequently we have a better chance of seeing them. Southern facing slopes on acid heaths are good places to look, especially in the Darent valley.

Slowworms are the most likely reptile to be seen. These unusual creatures have even penetrated to the central areas of London along railway embankments. Although they look like large worms, they have small eyes and a forked tongue and are in fact legless lizards. Half of their length or more is tail, which they can happily leave behind if seized, later growing a new, blunt-ended one. Hayes Common is a place to look for them.

Fish

In quiet stretches of rivers there is the possibility that early spawners such as pike, perch and loach could be laying their eggs. Dace, in places such as Hampton Court and the river Wandle, could be doing the same. Dace can be confused with roach but have a yellow eye rather than a red one. When looking down at fish from a bridge as you often can at Morden Hall Garden Centre you can’t usually see an eye. However, fins are usually visible and red ones would at first tend to indicate either a roach or a rudd. The dorsal fin of a roach is in the centre of its back and slightly further back in a rudd. Also the back of a rudd tends to be more yellow in colour. Any dace would tend to have fins far less red and they are usually slimmer and less deep bodied. Bream tend to have much darker fins although hybrids can have red ones. Chub, which is normally what you see at Morden, are usually given away by their wide head, wide mouth and thick lips. They also have red fins and a tendency to hang around places where they are fed, as they are at Morden Hall.