Frog rescue mission complicates clean-up

Frogs with a taste for the urban lifestyle have moved into a Whangarei city park, complicating the clean-up of an out-of-commission water fountain. A rescue mission was mounted and as of yesterday afternoon, WDC's Recreational Services Contractor and coincidental frog enthusiast Nick Connop had removed four from the fountain. He relocated them to the suburbs, Third Ave's Botanica Fernery, describing it as the "perfect" new home for them. Meanwhile, one of the frogs made a bid for freedom as a worker showed it to children on the nearby playground. It hopped across the bark, passing between the ankles of a panicked toddler, but was quickly apprehended and delivered to its new home. University of Otago's frog research leader Professor Phil Bishop said the frogs could have come from backyard water features on Norfolk St, or Cafler or Rugby parks. They could easily hop across a few city blocks on a rainy night, Mr Bishop said. They could also be unwanted pets that had been released. He said it had been a bumper year for frogs and while the Green and Golden Bells were not native, they were "very endangered" in their Australian homeland, so a lot of New Zealand herpetologists felt the need to protect them. "It is nice that they've bothered to [save the frogs], being an introduced species they're not obliged to," he said. Mr Bishop said the flaw in the council's plan could be that frogs often migrated back to where they were captured from, though researchers did not understand how they did this. "You might have to put some signs on the roads and tell people to slow down - frog crossing - that sort of thing," he said.