Life goes on...

This morning Alex and I went to an Open Day at Shuttleworth College in Bedfordshire, where he's applied to study Countryside Management (at the moment he's keeping his options open!). The weather was warm and springlike, and the college, which is set in around 4000 acres of parkland, was surrounded by fields of sheep with lambs. The hedgerows were showing new growth a cherry tree was in full bloom and bumble bees were on the wing.

When we arrived home I found a number of frogs in one of our ponds, some of them obviously feeling the call of spring. Normally we have about 200 frogs in the garden at this time of year, but the cold winter (possibly with some help from the herons) seems to have decimated them, and we have only seen ten or so at a time. Our largest pond, which is now quite shallow, froze almost solid and we found the bodies of many dead frogs in the bottom. I was so pleased to see that some have survived, and have already produced about ten clumps of spawn, enough to allow numbers to increase again in the future.

Given the incomprehensible horror of yesterday's earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and other recent disasters, I found some small comfort in the observation that life in the natural world goes on regardless, and that recovery can and will take place in time.