Never have I heard a chorus as complete as what we hear every single night outside our bedroom. It starts just before midnight, in the typical Dutch canal outside our small crooked terraced house, intensifies at around 3am and dies off as the birds start warming up their vocal chords and dawn. At first it was a bit of a nuisance, but now I think I will genuinely miss them when they are gone. Considering we live almost in the port of Vlaardingen, or Rotterdam, we smell the fumes of petrol and hear the working cranes, this plethora of quacks and noises is an absolute marvel.
It is the most perfect mating call, and funnily enough, every species of frogs have their own call so the females will only answer the call of a male frog of the same species! How odd yet convenient! And then the fun begins: the male frog mounts the female frog and can somtimes ride them for days on end before the fertilization is complete (years of reading the National Geographic pays off on such an occassion). I will not go into details of the process thereafter, noone needs a lecture on frog breeding, I am certain of that.
But I am grateful to have this little mystery of nature just outside our window, calling into the night , thousands of them, looking for a mate, probably more successfully then the human race.
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