UK Nature and Environment

More than two decades ago, I had the honour of running the world’s last (possibly only) frog telephone helpline. No, this is not a set-up for a punchline. It was a real service. Gardeners would grab the Yellow Pages, dial the frog helpline number and physically manifest, using their voice, sentences most of us would type into Google today: “If I dig a pond, will frogs come?” callers would ask, or: “How can I make my garden more attractive to amphibians?”

My role was simple. I was to fire these callers into action, offering realistic guidance on how gardens could be made more suitable for wildlife, especially frogs. Froglife, the charity that owned the helpline, saw in gardens a way for more amphibian habitats to be secured, away from the countryside which was then (and is still) being ravaged by pollution, land-use changes and more. And so, paid a minimum-wage salary, I spoke to 9,000 callers over a period of about three years.

It was perhaps the best job I ever had. In my spare time, I turned our small concrete backyard into a nature oasis, with two ponds for amphibians. In the years that followed, barely a day would go by when I wouldn’t see a frog stirring or hear the distinctive “plop” of one diving for cover as I walked past the pond. Some years, we had 15 frogs at a time; in spring, the bigger pond became a theatre for raucous, slimy sex. It was like a seasonal soap opera.