Amphibian icons of prodigious procreation

Buxton, Derbyshire What compels our imagination is the sheer drive of frogs and toads to get to the spawning ponds

What is it about frogs and toads that has made them such classic icons of sexual reproduction? It cannot be timing, because their breeding is often over before the other elements of high spring - flowers, bees, birdsong, sunshine - are in full flood. Frogs will gather at the spawning pond when the starlit nights are frosted and the vegetation rimed in white.

Nor can it be that frogs or toads flesh out the dawn chorus. I have often found that frogs are most vocal on late-winter nights, and the little burp of toads, which is more creak than croak, is so quiet one has to strain to pick it out. The soft, even, purring of frogs is sweeter but, as one herpetologist noted, a pondful of thousands in full throat was completely inaudible just 50m away.