Orange frog leaps into garden

9:59am Saturday 12th July 2008

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WITH its bright orange skin, you could easily mistake this colourful chap for an exotic relative - but the truth is it's just your common garden frog.

Despite looking like something more at home halfway up a tree in the depths of the Amazon rainforest, it was actually found lazing about in a Hampshire garden.

Belinda Fitzgerald was stunned when she stumbled across the frog as she was doing some gardening at her Southampton home.

The 45-year-old, of Aldermoor Road, Lordswood, said: "My husband Pete and I were moving slabs by the pond when he spotted something orange moving around near the waterfall.

"He said to me that it was an orange frog but I just thought that's crazy, we don't have orange frogs in this country.

"I had a closer look and there it was, an orange frog.

"I couldn't believe it.

"We caught it in a net and put it in some water in our greenhouse to keep it safe.

"We then got straight on the Internet to try to identify it, and the closest thing we found was a tree frog from Asia."

"I was so excited to have seen an orange frog.

"I've got hundreds of frogs in my garden but in all my time I've never seen an orange one.

"It was a lovely surprise."

But far from being a foreigner, the orange amphibian was revealed as simply a colourful common garden frog.

According to wildlife charity Froglife it is not unusual for common frogs to come in all colours of the rainbow.

Lucy Benyon said: "This is in fact not a diseased frog but an ordinary common frog with unusual colouring.

"Although common frogs are usually green or brown they can vary in colour quite a lot and we often get reports of red, orange, black or cream-coloured frogs which people think may be diseased or a foreign species."