I’m wondering if frogsong is the most wonderful sound in British nature that is now the least known and certainly the most underrated. I should add that I’m not talking about the silly soundscape used in cartoons and other trivia, which centres on a note transcribed as ribittt: common frogs never make that noise.
Their music is a soft, continuous purr that, for all its quietness, has an extraordinary impact. And it’s not always quiet. A friend remarked recently that frogs near him sounded “like a Harley Davison rally”. He exaggerates, but I know what he means: there’s a touch of the distant motorbike in many pond choruses.
I think of it more as a kind of infrasound, perhaps like the rumbling made by elephants that carries over great distances, or as something subterranean, as if all the sap and juices of an awakening Earth could find a way to express their seasonal uprising. The common frog’s voice is emblematic of it all.
Having declared its capacity to move me, I should add instantly that watching the live performance involves entirely different emotions. George Orwell said that toads reminded him of “strict Anglo-Catholics towards the end of Lent”, and frogs have a similarly serious demeanour. In my recent encounter, a cluster of males eventually permitted me to sit in attendance while they sang, albeit watching me in a circlet of disapproving caution around a mass of spawn.
Their heads rested at the surface, forelimbs arced before them and their remarkable three-tone eyes looking exactly like a black-flecked ball of spawns. Yet it was the voluminous white throat that held all my attention.
As each male adds his ha’p’orth to the flowing reel of their free-form chorus, the throat balloons out to twice the width of the head. In this momentary peak it resembles an almost luminous bubble, and it led me to appreciate how frogsong is often a nocturnal affair, when all the human eye would see is these globes of white bellowing in the dark. Then, the climax having been achieved, each frog deflates, its mouth shrinks, the face puckers up, reminding me ever so slightly of my beloved grandmother in her late eighties.
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