How the tadpoles came about and we care for them.

So, we are back at home today for our 5th wild day and the weather isn't really bee and butterfly weather is it? I got one walk in with the baby down the Wickham Railway Lane with a group of buggy walkers but was going at a brisk pace rather than stopping for wildlife or photographs. By the time I collected my oldest children from pre-school and school it was starting to rain in earnest. I was honestly a bit tired from coming back from holiday with jobs to do so supervising nature art didn't seem practical. Then I remembered: The tadpoles! It was time to give them a post-holiday food top-up with the boys. We added boiled lettuce and strange dehydrated bits of meat marketed as tadpole food that our friend had given us a half-term ago along with the tadpoles. The idea was to raise tadpoles from her neighbour's pond in our recycled aquarium ( this functioned as an ant hotel in 30DaysWild last year). Now we have several very large tadpoles that may start thinking about froghood soon. Some are still tiny and haven't caught up. We have made sure we added freshwater to the tank from a clean river at Droxford. Below are photographs of the boys collecting the water for the tadpoles using milk and apple juice cartons one day back in April. It was so wet today though that we just put our wellies on to go to the shed to see the tadpoles and back rather than run a river trip. They still seem to have enough water although the aquarium is filling up a bit with tadpole poo at the bottom the water still seems clear and there is oxygenating weed in the tank.