A Croak of Wisdom: Frogs, Toads, and Midnight Serenades

A Croak of Wisdom: A Modern Aesop’s Fable

Remember Aesop’s tales of clever animals teaching us life lessons? Well, nothing in those pages prepared me for frogs and toads hosting nightly symphonies right in my backyard. And you, dear reader, can share with me the life lesson once you discern it.

Let me set the scene: the sun dips below the horizon, the pond across the way glints under a sliver of moonlight, and — BAM! — the air explodes with croaks and chirps so loud you’d think the amphibian world was plotting world domination. Honestly, these frogs must believe they’re the headliners at some exclusive pondside EDM festival.

Frogs have been serenading me (needlessly, I might add) for a while now. Back in Kolkata, after a good rain, I’d hear them lulling me to sleep during summer vacations spent with family. I can still picture those big nights on the courtyard near the pond: my brother was persuaded to put on a full performance of Bengali folk songs (which, yes, I had helpfully transcribed into Hindi and English for him — the irony isn’t lost on me). My grandmother would occasionally sing along, or I would, while the rest of the family — my mom, dad, maternal uncle, aunt, and cousin sister — drifted in and out of the scene, happy as listeners. My even younger cousin brother, barely a toddler, took it upon himself to guard my brother from any unwanted intrusions.

Mid-performance, a couple of frogs dared to join the show with their unsolicited backup vocals. But without missing a beat, my quick-thinking cousin leapt into action, deftly trapping the noisy intruders under small baskets lying nearby — a moment of fable-worthy cunning, worthy of Aesop’s cleverest animals. Those small moments still bring a smile, or even an outright laugh, across oceans and decades.

When your brother is the star performer, grandma’s on backup vocals, and toddler cousin handles frog control

Fast forward to Milwaukee: my first spring here, as the world thawed from winter, I heard such a racket outside that I genuinely mistook it for low-grade construction noise — understandable since our new suburb was invaded every morning by bulldozers and drills. Little did I know it was frogs, fresh out of hibernation, throwing a full-blown welcome-back concert right outside my window.

I once complained to my boys about the racket — how the chorus outside my window was out-croaking the geese from their previous night shift. Their sympathy was all with the frogs — their point being that the frogs were just, well, singing for love. As if that made the symphony any more bearable at 1 a.m. When they started calling them our “tiny tenors of the night,” I wondered if I — along with my neighbors, all sharing the fortunes of a runoff pond in our backyards — should start billing our houses as open-air amphitheaters.

We could throw the ultimate weekend bash: honking geese blowing their morning trumpets, croaking frogs crooning like soggy rock stars, howling coyotes joining in with neighborhood dogs barking along like rowdy backup singers, and screeching owls belting out their eerie late-night solos…

Because of that runoff pond behind our home, we’ve somehow collected a growing population of frogs. Some evenings, walking across the lawn feels like a scene from the parting of the Red Sea — the grass practically splitting as frogs leap left and right to get out of my way. These little guys certainly don’t wait for a welcome mat.

Every step I take, the frogs scatter like I’m parting the Red Sea — except greener and much, much jumpier

So here we are: frogs croaking like they own the neighborhood, toads adding basslines from the shadows, and a mom realizing Aesop missed a fable about the wisdom of noise-canceling headphones.