Diary of a Shopkeeper, 10th September

I was driving home through Orphir late on Thursday evening after a Science Festival event. As I left Kirkwall the sky was full of lightning, both sheets and forks, and I could hear rumbles of thunder over the car engine. By the time I passed Scapa Corner, the lightning had stopped. Rain pelted down, dinging off the tarmac in my headlights. It was the most impressive lightning display for years. Only recently there was the supermoon, and before that the Perseid meteors – a great few weeks for sky watchers!

And then my eye was caught by something much more down to earth, and at first insignificant. A tiny white beastie in the middle of the road, hopping through the raindrops: hop, pause, hop, towards the safety of the verge. I adjusted my steering slightly to avoid squashing the creature. I’ve seen fewer frogs on this road than meteors in the sky, and I wouldn’t want to reduce the number further. Then another one hopped into the beam of my headlights, and beyond that I could see another. And all the way from the Foveran to Swanbister, light-coloured frogs went hopping across the road.

I noted the first dozen with interest. Then I realised there were scores, maybe even hundreds. And as well as hopping frogs, there were many that had hopped into the path of previous vehicles and paid the price. After a break as I passed through Orphir village, the frogs appeared again. They were f ewer in number here, but there they were, hopping through the rain. It was only when I got to Scorrabrae that the frogs disappeared.

I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I’ve driven that road thousands of times and I’ve seen one or two frogs at most in all those years. Had the torrential rain convinced them that the A964 was a giant pond they should dive into? Or had the thunder and lightning storm freaked them out and sent them hopping off in search of safety?

And here’s the strangest thing. All the frogs were hopping in the same direction. I’m not making this up: all the frogs were travelling northwards, from the Scapa Flow side of the road towards the hills. So the frogs were not just scared out of their ditches and sent fleeing in random directions. No, they were all driven – as the last echoes of thunder rumbled, and the rain poured down – to simultaneously fling themselves across the road from south to north.

As I drove the last mile home, a childhood memory came to mind: an old man, a fiddle player, telling a tale of something he’d witnessed in his youth.

Late one night, cycling homewards on the road near Kincardine O’Neil, he noticed something dark moving in the field between the road and the River Dee. It wasn’t a recognisable creature, it was a mass of something, a black wave of small dark animals. He watched. The dark shape swarmed over the dyke and into the road, ahead of him and behind him. In the feeble light of his cycle lamp, he could see it was made up of rats. Hundreds of rats. Thousands of rats.

He froze in terror. The rats kept coming. They streamed up the field, over the dyke, and into the road: a black river of fur, pink feet and eyes glinting in the lamplight. The stream parted without pausing as it came to his bike wheels, and the rats kept running across the road and into the wood on the north side. They were completely silent, the only sound being the noise of thousands of paws, tens of thousands of claws, scrabbling on the surface of the midnight road. Eventually, after ten minutes, the flood subsided, and then the rats were gone. He pedalled home as fast as his shaking legs would allow.

“What was it?” I said.

“It was a rat flitting,” he replied, “And I hope you never see one coming towards you.”

I never have. But on Thursday night I witnessed a frog flitting. I record this nature observation now as my meagre contribution towards the Orkney International Science Festival.     

Since publication, I’ve been told stories of one mass frog appearance in Fife - also during heavy rain - and two rat flittings in Orkney, one on the Ramsquoy road in Stenness and one on the Old Finstown Road. Also, a friend of a friend confirmed that they’d also seen the frog flitting in Orphir about the same time I did.

Photo courtesy of the Scottish Wildlife Trust: https://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/species/common-frog/

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 13th September 2023. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.