Unwanted frogs and tadpoles in stream

[Pgachee]

One thing frogs do not like is STRONG WATER CURRENT, increase your streams water flow and you will end your frog invasion without killing them

I have large pumps and it’s already on a the highest setting.

 

[zinjy]

I love frogs, but if you really want to keep the frog population down for some reason, killing frogs constantly yourself is not going to be effective. Also you're going to be dealing with lots of dead frogs/tadpoles in your pond, which is going to be worse than live ones as they decay. Your best bet for ongoing frog control is to attract or add animals which eat frogs and especially tadpoles. The good news is there are lots of things which eat frogs, so it's not going to be getting into the millions despite the number of tadpoles currently there. Snakes, birds, certain fish, even some cats and dogs will eat frogs (I used to have a cat that loved to catch frogs, to my distress) (snake repellant is not the way to go here because they would eat the frogs). You could bring in something domestic for temporary control but in the long term stock some tadpole-eating fish and try to attract natural predators like herons and snakes (or whatever lives in your area, not sure what part of the country you are in) because they will definitely keep the population in check. I've heard heron decoys can actually attract herons by alerting them that the fishing is good there, there are also decoys for other water birds which are designed to attract them into landing. Maybe you have someone nearby who owns a large snake that they buy live prey for, you could help each other out with the adult frogs. You might be able to scoop out or trap some of the tadpoles to relocate them, it will also be much easier to manage if you simply scoop out the egg clusters that you can find when they are first laid. You'll probably still have population explosions in the spring; my guess is the reason you have a population explosion now is that natural predators in the area have not yet figured out this is where all the frogs are. Please don't use some sort of poison: if you do that you will kill the predators that do eat the frogs and your frog population will get much larger in the future as a result.

 

[Pgachee]

I love frogs, but if you really want to keep the frog population down for some reason, killing frogs constantly yourself is not going to be effective. Also you're going to be dealing with lots of dead frogs/tadpoles in your pond, which is going to be worse than live ones as they decay. Your best bet for ongoing frog control is to attract or add animals which eat frogs and especially tadpoles. The good news is there are lots of things which eat frogs, so it's not going to be getting into the millions despite the number of tadpoles currently there. Snakes, birds, certain fish, even some cats and dogs will eat frogs (I used to have a cat that loved to catch frogs, to my distress) (snake repellant is not the way to go here because they would eat the frogs). You could bring in something domestic for temporary control but in the long term stock some tadpole-eating fish and try to attract natural predators like herons and snakes (or whatever lives in your area, not sure what part of the country you are in) because they will definitely keep the population in check. I've heard heron decoys can actually attract herons by alerting them that the fishing is good there, there are also decoys for other water birds which are designed to attract them into landing. Maybe you have someone nearby who owns a large snake that they buy live prey for, you could help each other out with the adult frogs. You might be able to scoop out or trap some of the tadpoles to relocate them, it will also be much easier to manage if you simply scoop out the egg clusters that you can find when they are first laid. You'll probably still have population explosions in the spring; my guess is the reason you have a population explosion now is that natural predators in the area have not yet figured out this is where all the frogs are. Please don't use some sort of poison: if you do that you will kill the predators that do eat the frogs and your frog population will get much larger in the future as a result.

I hate snakes and don’t want to attract them, which is part of the reason I want to nip this in the bud. We have copperheads and black snakes. I definitely don’t want to deal with copperheads. As I mentioned above we have a 3-4” stream, no pond, no fish. Birds would be fine.
The tadpoles are too fast for me to catch as they dive under the gravel. I looked for egg clusters but didn’t see any. And I haven’t been killing the frogs. I’m just relocating about 12 a day and that’s getting tiring.

 

[zinjy]

Without seeing your setup, I'm not sure this would work, but as your water feature just consists of a stream that is being artificially circulated: what if you set up a straining device towards the lower end and turned off the water gradually (reducing the flow, so the tadpoles would follow the water downhill until it is shut off). They will not want to be stranded out of the water, and you could possibly collect them at the bottom in some sort of sieve or net. If you leave the stream off for a while then, the adult frogs will probably leave eventually or get eaten (or move to the nearby creek) and you could be vigilant about removing frog egg clumps that appear in the future, while trying to attract water birds to the area.