Try a Tadpole

As long as there have been kids and tadpoles, kids have been fascinated by tadpoles. And perhaps tadpoles have been fascinated by kids. We don’t know.

If you have never watched a slippery little head-with-a-tail change into a fat-bellied frog, it’s time to try it. The first step is to visit a pond in early spring to collect frog or toad eggs, or spawn. Frog spawn looks like a mass of cloudy jelly; toad spawn looks like long strings of black beads; and newt spawn is found as single eggs, each surrounded by clear jelly. Collect about a handful of one kind of spawn. Don’t mix frog and toad or newt spawn in the same container.  Put the spawn in a gallon jar or aquarium filled with pond water, and add some water weeds.

Your part in growing little frogs is easy. Keep the aquarium out of direct sunlight. Change the water once a week – always using pond water, not tap water. And once the tadpoles have hatched, provide water plants or decaying lettuce for them to eat. When the tadpoles begin to grow their back legs, their diet will change to meat. You can hang a tiny piece of meat in the water. Or simply feed them bits of dog or cat food.

As the tadpoles lose their tails and begin to breathe air, place rocks in the aquarium so that they can climb out of the water. Keep the aquarium covered or they may jump out! When the young frogs become this active, it’s time to release them at the pond where you collected the spawn. Then they will be in the right environment to catch the insects they need to eat.

Releasing tiny frogs in this way – after keeping them safe from predators while they were growing – is helpful to the frog population, which sadly is declining.        

From A Kid’s Spring EcoJournal by Toni Albert.

​Early in March, before any sign of spring, a chorus of frog song disturbs the winter silence. Frog song! Many frogs migrate back to the pond where they were tadpoles, where the males call and croak to attract females for a splashy spring fling. (That’s literal. There is much splashing.) Each species of frog has its own call, and even those of the same species may alternate their calls, so that the complete song is rhythmic and complex – and loud. At first I think it’s like the overture to a symphony, but after a few minutes, I admit it’s more like the instruments tuning up.

After hearing frog song, it’s time to look for frogspawn (frog eggs). The singing – and flinging – will go on for weeks until our pond is dotted with clumps of white jelly or clear jelly. The frog eggs, which are black, are clearly seen inside the clumps. Later we’ll be able to see the eggs develop inside the jelly until tiny black tadpoles are visible. It’s exciting – like looking at a sonogram.

Bob and I took our dog Jazzy to walk through the woods to our pond. The water is tea colored because of the leaves that have fallen into it but absolutely clear. It only took a minute to find the first clump of frogspawn at the water’s edge. While we took photos, Jazzy lay in the sun, gnawing on a deer shoulder bone she found. Across the pond from us, the sun was sparkling on the water in tiny points of light. More frog eggs? Surely not that many, enough to cover 15 square feet. But, yes, there were more frog eggs than we’ve ever seen in one place. It’s going to be an interesting spring!
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Note: When I direct children to look for frogspawn, I sometimes use a definition that was written by a six-year-old in one of my writing workshops. After studying frog eggs in a large jar, she wrote, “Frog eggs look like a little ghost that drowned at the bottom of a pond.” Have children look for milky white globs of jelly, usually about the size of a fist or two fists, or clumps of clear jelly with black eggs inside them. And of course, don’t let children explore a pond without adult supervision. 

Aldo Leopold has been called “the father of wildlife management” and “the father of wildlife ecology” and the “father of conservation ethics.” Have children read about Aldo Leopold’s life and work. Ask them to list the “firsts” that Leopold accomplished. Then discuss what it means to be called the father of a movement or of a new way of thinking. What qualities does a person need in order to think in a new way and to become “the first” in his field?


​Have children choose one month’s entry in A Sand County Almanac to read and study. 

• Ask them to copy their favorite passage and explain why they like it.
• Ask what they learned about nature after reading Leopold’s remarks. Can they connect it to their own experience in some way?
• How did Leopold gain the information he presented? Does it seem like something he learned by studying or by observing – or by both methods? Ask children to give an example from their reading.

Ask children to design a research project to learn something about nature. Begin with a question, then include research, exploration, and record keeping. If possible, have them carry out their projects and present their findings.

​Aldo Leopold wrote, “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

• Ask children whether they can or cannot live without wild things and why.

Leopold wrote, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

• Ask children to consider these opposite beliefs: Land belongs to its owner. We belong to the land (we are part of a community, which includes living plants and animals, soil, and water). How do we treat land when we think it is just there to serve us? How do we treat land when we think it is a living community that we belong to?

​​This is Aldo Leopold Week and communities throughout our nation are celebrating his life and legacy. The events vary from interactive discussions of his ideas to family nature outings, from readings of A Sand County Almanac to viewing Green Fire, an award-winning documentary film about Leopold and his work. I'm celebrating all week by trying to see our woods and pond and creek through Leopold's eyes.

This is Aldo Leopold Week, a good time to get to know more about him. Born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, he would become a scientist, ecologist, conservationist, philosopher, forester, teacher, and author. As a boy, he loved and explored nature, so when Gifford Pinchot donated money to Yale to develop one of our nation’s first forestry schools, he determined to go to Yale and become a forester. After graduating, he joined the Forestry Service and worked in Arizona and New Mexico.
Leopold was one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, and in 1924, he initiated the first Forest Wilderness Area in the United States, the Gila National Forest. In that year, he was transferred to the US Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was an associate director. He founded the profession of game management and wrote the first important book on the subject. In 1933, he was appointed Professor of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This was the first professorship of wildlife management. Shortly before his death in 1948, he was assigned as a conservation adviser to the United Nations.  

This is Aldo Leopold Week, time to re-read his Sand County Almanac, an environmental classic. In Wisconsin, Leopold bought 80 acres in the sand country of central Wisconsin. The land had been deforested, overgrazed by cattle, and repeatedly burned by wildfires. It was a perfect laboratory for testing his theories of conservation and ethics. He advocated that each public and private land owner should manage and conserve wildlife habitats and diversity of species on the land. It was also the perfect place to write his almanac.
 
A Sand County Almanac is eloquent and funny, compassionate and determined, wise and important. It ranges from keen descriptions of nature on his Sand County property, month by month (the almanac), to essays on man’s destruction of the land and a “plea for a Wilderness esthetic.” The book begins: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”

Favorite passages from A Sand County Almanac:
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

“I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about when chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”

“But all conservation is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

“… I am glad that I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

“Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there is little left but noise.”

“A little repentance just before a species goes over the brink is enough to make us feel virtuous. When the species is gone we have a good cry and repeat the performance.”

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

"That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics."

"A society grows wise when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit."

 “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”