Above, you can see our small collection of tadpoles a few months ago, which we liberated from an overcrowded pond near our home. We fed them every day on a tiny amount of shredded & heavily boiled spinach, plus some crushed protein tablets for loaches - following the advice we found on an Aussie website.
The biggest tadpoles then began to sprout back legs. A few weeks later, they had front legs too and were beginning to 'sunbathe' on floating leaves placed in their little bucket (kept topped up with rain water or 'aged' tap water, i.e. water that's been chemically aged with a solution you can get at most aquarium shops or that's simply been left to stand for a few days).
Once they had developed these strong front and back legs, I manually removed each tadpole from the bucket, one at a time, over a series of days, and placed them into our battered old fishtank ... now dry, except for a very shallow amount of water in the base to keep the air moist, but with the two shelves on either side dry and the base covered in leaves and branches to give the new froglets plenty of vantage points for climbing out if they got trapped in the water.
The biggest challenge since transferring them to the dry tank has been to feed the new frogs adequately. The old diet was clearly no longer right. So I've been scouring our garden for the tiniest possible bugs and flies with which to feed the babies. Caterpillar eggs laid on the back of nasturtium flowers and stems seem to have gone down particularly well with them. Also those tiny green and white flies which cling to the underside of sycamore leaves.
Every morning, I take the fresh leaf or stem and place it into the dry tank ... a day or so later, most of the 'snacks' on it will appear to have been eaten.
Certainly the frogs are growing apace ...
Soon the children and I will release these growing frogs back into the wild, at the site of the pond where we collected them as tadpoles, and then they'll have to fend for themselves.
