From a Full Stop to a Comma

Friday 31st March 2000
Nature Diary     Rocks     History     Gallery     Links     Home Page    

After an hour or two in the studio working on the computer, I take my writing outdoors too. In my coffee break I wander down to the pond.

The Frog tadpoles have hatched, hundreds of them. They've gathered in the sunshine on the green jelly of their spawn in a mass like black vermicelli. A female Common Newt pushes through the jelly like a child wading through a roomful of plastic balls. Just the tail of a male newt sticks out from the jelly. The tail is blade-shaped, crimped at the edges and decorated with spots, stripes and bands of colour, like the pennant carried by a medieval herald.

The newts sit at the edge of the mass of little tadpoles and pick them off one at a time, like guests dipping into the seafood at a sushi bar.

Life for a tadpole starts with a large black full stop in the the jelly of the frogspawn, it progresses to a fat comma and, if it gets beyond this sushi bar stage, it swims off as a letter 'S'.

A Comma butterfly punctuates its erratic flight through the garden with a short rest to sunbathe on the green leaves of the hawthorn.

Richard Bell,
wildlife illustrator
E-mail; 'richard@daelnet.co.uk'