Frogs
Frogs are amphibians. They like to live on land but always return to water to lay their eggs.
They like to be in or near a POND but you often find them in wet places in the garden.
The skin of the frog is green, brown and yellow with black or brown blotches.
A young frog could be as small as 1cm but they are usually between 7-10cm
Their skin is usually damp which helps them breath
Food: Frogs eat all sorts of small animals such as slugs, snails, beetles, worms, flies, spiders and woodlice.
In the Spring: Frogs go back to the pond where they were born. The female frog lays thousands of eggs in the water.
These eggs are called FROGSPAWN and look like jelly.
After 10 days, TADPOLES hatch out and to begin with they eat tiny green plants.
The tadpoles grow slowly into little frogs and they climb out of the pond in June.
In the Winter: frogs HIBERNATE, sleeping under a pile of logs, in a compost heap or in the mud at the bottom of a pond.
Frogs in danger! Lots of animals like to eat frogs! Some of their PREDATORS (the animals that eat them) are hedgehogs, grass snakes, owls, foxes, big fish and ducks. Most tadpoles are eaten by pond animals – only a few grow into frogs. Another big problem for frogs is that people have filled in many ponds or made the ponds POLLUTED (dirty) by throwing litter into them. This means that the homes of frogs are disappearing. If the ponds disappear then all the frogs would disappear too – they would become EXTINCT. Most frogs are now found in garden ponds or in school ponds.
Helping frogs: You can help frogs find a home by making a pond in your garden. Keep the water clean and grow lots of plants around the edge to give the frogs shade and somewhere to hide. Put some stones or logs near the pond too. If you collect frogspawn to watch it hatch into tadpoles, please make sure that you put the young frogs back into the pond when they have grown their legs.
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