Country diary: the tadpoles in this toad soup are dining on me

Buxton, Derbyshire: Some mysterious mechanism - hunger possibly - caused the shoal to wind onwards and entwine a rock

It is remarkable how the signal to breed hardwired into the brains of toads brings the creatures to the ponds at Lightwood in such numbers. Yet thereafter one is struck by their almost total invisibility. Since the April frenzy involving perhaps 10,000 adults I have seen one. And that was in Staffordshire.

Yet those adults have left us a multitude of offspring, which now form a long winding oil-slick of primal life in the top pond at Lightwood. The differing depths of water in the four pools have an inbuilt Goldilocks benefit: whatever the seasonal conditions, one of them will meet the needs of the hour, and in our drought state it is the toads in the deepest water that flourish.