Apple season is just about here. My tree, having started perhaps a month late this year, has mostly skipped the apple enlargement stage (despite receiving plenty of water and sun) but is heading towards applying colour and ripeness(?) anyway.

A wet and windy month. Allegedly that was still summer. It seemed more like monsoon season rolled into autumn.

Consequently, there wasn’t much in the way of frogs arrayed around the pond (as they tend to be on warm fly-filled days and evenings).

Today’s offering of amphibian(s) from the cellar, after a few days of near continuous deluge, was just one small but wonderfully plump froglet. Since its tail was all gone, perhaps I should start thinking of it as a frog now.

It must have been one of this year’s early pond leavers and then been very busy/greedy all summer eating everything it met in the undergrowth. I think it’s too small to have been one of last year’s late developers.

Zombie [guardian.co.uk] ants [nature.com] and hungry [sciencedaily.com] mammoths [bbc.co.uk] were [news.bbc.co.uk] already [planetearth.nerc.ac.uk] in trouble [telegraph.co.uk] (mad picture there!).

. . .

The other night I met a hedgehog - the first (live) one in a long time compared with some years ago.

Not exactly natural but still mostly science:

Telegraph [telegraph.co.uk]
Grauniad [guardian.co.uk]
Independent [independent.co.uk]
BBC [bbc.co.uk]

Grauniad [guardian.co.uk]
STV [news.stv.tv]
CBBC [news.bbc.co.uk]
BBC [bbc.co.uk]

... allegedly [telegraph.co.uk] have a characteristically different [independent.co.uk] shape [guardian.co.uk] - or at least the adult male ones are currently testing out that way. Cutting the psychobabbling nutters and fraudsters [bbc.co.uk] out of the diagnostic process would certainly be an improvement. It’s interesting that, thus far, ADHD isn’t showing up as "real".

Not exactly unexpected (consider the gulf stream and similar flows in the atmosphere) but interesting to study [telegraph.co.uk].

... might [newscientist.com] have been just the juvenile [bbc.co.uk] form [cbsnews.com] of torosaurus. Some other dinosaur species, previously classified as distinct, may have had a similar developmental relationship to each other. This in turn could mean the decline of the dinosaurs, before their final extinction (at the infamous cataclysmic event boundary), was even more marked.

At least this time we’re going to get to keep the triceratops name (the more famous and beloved of the two). Unlike the loss of brontosaurus to apatosaurus (due to its prior naming) when those two were declared to be the same species.

This [telegraph.co.uk] is a spectacularly unhelpful [bbc.co.uk] piece of research [google.com] - from my point of view. I have auto-immune problems and thus am degrading at a far more rapid rate than normal people but I’m allergic to alcohol - even the fumes are enough to make me ill. So it would be very much a case of the "cure" being worse than the disease.

All they have at the moment is a correlation though. They still have to establish any mechanism of causation from that.

They may not be an aphrodisiac but they do get their own form of a sexually transmitted disease [bbc.co.uk]. Poor oysters [telegraph.co.uk]. As if being bred to be eaten by humans [guardian.co.uk] wasn’t bad enough.

The birds have been going a little bit mad lately. They’ve been poinging about the garden, bouncing off the hedges, dipping in the pond and getting through the seeds in the feeder at about three times the normal rate (although some of that merely ends up on the ground underneath the feeder because they are so careless in their extraction of the seeds).

My neighbours have been complaining about being attacked by mosquitoes. In the UK, this generally means gnats (or midges in the north) - ie the smaller species which are not even carriers of malaria.

My pond was blamed but it’s not the only static water in the area and it looks to me as though the frogs are doing a good job of insect control on their patch. I’ve seen no egg rafts and, having tested repeatedly, there isn’t much sign of larvae hanging around under the surface of the water either.

There are at least 3 other ponds in the immediate area - 2 probably larger than mine and 1 smaller. That one is in the conservatory of the neighbour who blames my pond and right under their bedroom window. None of these people have my fondness for frogs and hence are at greater risk of insect infestations.

I checked the indoor pond but, perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t showing signs of a large larval contingent either. However, the already known hang-out of the gnats is actually the cellar sump belonging to the same neighbours! It’s not a large body of water but it doesn’t have to be for gnats to breed. They can use any puddle or unemptied open bucket which lasts long enough.

So I think they are being attacked by their own gnats - coming out of the cellar at night, through the drain and light-well, and back in through the open bedroom windows (because the people who got bitten are the foolish sort who leave windows open and not from the subset of people who don’t).

The run of hot sunny weather [metoffice.gov.uk] continues across quite a lot of the UK. It has already been enough [telegraph.co.uk] to trigger a rise in the death rate [google.com] - as is typical during both hot and cold extremes. The US and Canada also have problems [news.bbc.co.uk]. The additional heat (or cold) stress tips the balance for those who were on the verge of dying from other things anyway. And then there is the stupidity factor of people behaving inappropriately ...

Finally, some snapdragons which snap again - after years of only defective (non-snapping) ones being sold, if any at all! Though I did have to have someone grow these for me from a special packet of seed.

The weather has been very hot at just the wrong time for my froglets. They’ve been scrambling up the side of the pond (as they like to do once they have 4 functional limbs) and then slowly cooking because they are too stupid to leap back into the water in time. Some get stuck to the rubber lining, if they failed to select a mossy patch for their climb. Others end up upside-down and stranded in the grass (because they are rubbish at jumping too) and become dessicated there instead.

I’ve been going out (semi-)regularly the past few days to try to keep them safely wet and/or in the pond for now (by startling them, pouring water on them and even moving them back myself), but it’s an ongoing battle against very persistent froglet stupidity. Tiny bodies and even tinier brains.

Meanwhile, the waterlily is on its second flower out of three buds it put up close together. It never really got the first one fully open before giving up on it.

In amongst the weed and the water-lilies and all the lazy slow-developing tadpoles in the pond, I spotted my first couple of this year’s froglets - having little arms as well as legs and tail.

Some of my tadpoles have finally reached the stage of having proper knees to their legs (rather than unobtrusive pale leg spikes). It will be a while before they do anything much with them though. The feet are still lacking in definition. Meanwhile, other tadpoles in the same pond have remained relatively small and undeveloped.

There’s danger [nhs.uk] in unsanitised [news.bbc.co.uk] car windscreen washer reservoirs [google.com]. But you’re not safe at home either [news.bbc.co.uk].

Sometimes it can be very pretty [manataka.org] but still toxic [guardian.co.uk].

There have been a lot of these lately.

Much earlier in the year the robins managed to produce a fledgling (possibly only the one). Then the dunnocks had a couple of fluffy things running around in the shrubbery and the starlings had their usual increase in gang members. The blackbirds did have some fledglings but I’m not sure whether any at all survived the multiple cat attacks on them. But now there are great tits, blue tits (at least 8!), goldfinches, another batch of robins (2-4?), possibly greenfinches and some insufficiently visible long-tailed tits (unclear if it was just adults).