amphibians

My yard is loaded with toads. I love it ! I would like to have more frogs though and hope to create an inviting spot closer to my home with my mini retention pond. I especially like toads and frogs and they are great to have around for bug eating as well as being great animals to alert you to enviromental problems because they are paricularly sensitive to pollution and pesticides. A drop in the number of amphibians can give early clues to an enviromental contamination problem. For this reason many amphibian populations are on the decline. Help give our froggish freinds a safe home!
http://www.toadilytoads.com/gardentoads.html

Very nice thread Leah, and a nice link too. Amphibians are kind of like the canary in the mine. However many people do not realize this.

Toads are a great addition to the garden as they do eat a lot of bugs, bad and beneficial. But they eat enough bad bugs that we do what we can to encourage them to stay. They do like some kind of shelter be it the cute ones in the link you provided or under a large leaf or plant.

One thing we do is take a terracotta flower pot and turn it upside down, place a small stone on one side to raise it a bit, and/or dig out a little dirt so they can crawl under it. They seem to like these fine as a shelter.

We get our drinking water from a fresh water spring. In our reservoir I am delighted when I find a salamander. Salamanders require very clean water to survive. The old timers around here say "If it's fit enough for a salamander, it's fit enough for us."

these guys are the best. I love to hear them sing at night.

I hope it's okay to ressurect this; I love the site Leah linked to. I've got toads and frogs in my polytunnel, and I've been wondering if I should provide them with anything besides shelter and water. I think I'll replace Mr Toad's current shelter with a terracotta pot:) Of course, they were probably doing fine without my help, but I really like them.

Anyone know of an equally good site for frogs?

Also, anyone happen to know what the mimimum size is for a pond that amphibians will breed in? Ours are pretty small if that makes any difference (bufo bufo and rana temporaria). I did try google, but gave up...

I have had frogs breed in a small garden pond of about 100 gallons. I have some quite large Leopard Frog tadpoles in this pond right now, who look like they're thinking about turning into frogs. I plan to build one or two larger frog ponds in the next year or two. One should include diverse plant habitat around the pond, lots of rocks and logs, and not have fish in the pond (they may eat eggs or small tadpoles). Apparently it's best not to have a pump because frogs prefer still water to breed in.

Interesting. If I manage to squeeze a pond into the garden it will be even smaller than that, but definitely fish and pump free and with good habitat.