What is it about mating common frogs that is so humorous? Part of it is surely their physical comedy, such as the winking white throats bellowing in and out as the males chorus at the surface. Then there are the old man’s skinny legs on all frogs. My mother-in-law mentions the ear-to-ear grin across every frog face.
Another friend talks about an aura of “smugness” about them and, indeed, there is something faintly ridiculous about the way one will climb across the spawn lolling at the surface, and stand on top, full square, head raised proudly as if in ownership of the entire hoard.
There is also something gloriously shameless about frogs: how they will clamber over their fellows, briefly smothering them or working with those immense hindlegs against a neighbour’s face, forcing each gold-rimmed black eye to close, then reopen after it finally passes. None seems to mind either the inconvenience or these levels of familiarity.
The thing I love most, aside from the song – the throaty granular music that swells up at the surface and is as smooth as frog skin in water – is the animals’ collective willingness to accept me. Make a sudden move and you are left with an empty pond, but for many small overlapping ripples, yet slow your pace to a heron’s stalk and you can get right down among them. In fact, I can vouch that a human thumb and four fingers at the water’s surface can start to seem highly attractive to an amorous frog.
At that range you can watch each pinhole nostril on an amphibian’s nose, billowing air in and out, working precisely as it has done for the last 200m years. And to kneel in my waders among the pond’s atmosphere of natural abundance, to be accepted on equal terms by its owners, provided a special kind of reward. For a moment, amid the wider church-bell-ringing song of song thrushes or the chiming of great tits, surrounded by the fellowship of frogs, I was allowed to feel that March 2020 was like any other spring, and that all would soon be well with the world.
