In message 7, Tom
Gardner writes
Jupiter wrote in
:

On my return indoors I found a frog sitting on the
kitchen floor. This fellow had surmounted a high threshold into my
brewery/bakery and then negotiated a step into the kitchen.

Pah, that's nothing ;}

My front door is 4 steps up from the concrete driveway,
and is about 20' from any greenery. Twice I've come
home at about 9pm and jumped out of my skin when a frog
jumped off the floor onto the drive.

And I'm sure they'll go much futhur across concrete.

OTOH this year the frogspawn in my pond arrived
a bit early, and a few weeks later "suddenly"
turned into empty sacs. Any idea what might have
caused this? I presume they were eaten, but just
maybe it is something to do with the pond
containing a lot of algae at that time.

It is possible that you have a large number of planarians in the pond.
They are small, leech like, flatworms that will steadily munch their way
through frogspawn. These invertebrates arrived in our pond some years
ago and removed all the embryos from the clumps of spawn for a couple of
years. We now watch out for the spawn to appear, remove it to a couple
of large containers and return the tadpoles to the pond when they have
hatched - so that the newts have got something to eat :-)

--
Robert