July can be a great month to see our common toad complete metamorphosis and become toadlets. It usually takes around two to four weeks for tadpoles to hatch out from the egg and roughly sixteen weeks for tadpoles to reach the stage where legs have developed. This is often affected by the water temperature in the pond as well as numbers of larvae present and food availability – as tadpoles are busy eating algae in the pond for their nutrition. Toadlets will form legs, absorb their tails, form lungs to breathe out of the water and eventually leave their pond to head out onto land.
You may have been lucky enough to see toadlets emerge, in huge numbers, in previous years near ponds. They won’t move too far from their breeding pond however as they will be busy foraging and developing in summer and early autumn to get ready for the overwintering period. Emergence occurs in higher numbers after periods of rainfall at any time of day.
