Joe Bennett: A toast to the frog, sadly a blinking light on extinction's dashboard

A bell frog on flax. Like all life, frogs exist to go on existing. Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

OPINION:

I sat outside for a while last night with a glass of vodka. Vodka is my new best friend, the distilled essence of what I've been moving toward for half a century without quite realising. It seems close to the thing itself, as near to the truth as I've come so far. And as I sat and sipped in the cold night air, I listened to the frogs.

I'm told that night is loud in the African jungle - all shrieks and screams and sudden murder. It's quieter here. Sometimes the little owl whoops or the possums hiss and cackle, and there's the odd scuttle of unseen rodents, but by and large it's peaceful under the southern cross, as the clouds scud over the face of the moon. Except, as now, when the frogs go to it.

They live further up the valley around a little spring that seems never to run dry, for I hear them sometimes even in the height of summer. I haven't seen them but I know them from the sound they make. They are whistling frogs or brown tree frogs, introduced from Tasmania in the 19th century.

Their call is like a cricket's trill and they go at it with astonishing gusto. It's a mating cry, of course, the male frogs announcing to the females, boasting, luring them in. And doing so from afar. The frogs are smaller than my thumb and they're perhaps 80 metres up the valley but their trill reaches me undiminished.

I don't know how they find the warmth to live. Their skins are no protection. Their size is no protection. Last night, despite my bulk and clothing, I was shivering within minutes, but they, minuscule and butt-naked to the world, were just crying out for sex. I don't pretend to understand the physiology but I can only admire the urgency. Like all life, frogs exist to go on existing.

They're vaguely comic, frogs: their slow, wide-footed crawl; their great broad grin; their necklessness; the throats that they inflate to boom their calling out; their sudden hops; their amphibiousness, neither of the water or of the land; and their bulging pop-up eyes like the headlights on old Citroens.

I've eaten frogs. In France, inevitably, though they're popular in other European countries and in Asia. In China, frog is known as field chicken.

It's the thighs you eat, les cuisses, the muscles enlarged by all that jumping. The French cook them in butter, garlic and parsley. Cook anything in butter, garlic and parsley and it's good. As I remember it, the flesh of frog was bland and white and there was very little of it.

But I got far greater pleasure, years before, from frogspawn. When I was a kid the ponds grew thick with it in spring, an abundant mass of squishy, vaguely sticky strings of pearls. We gathered it up in jars and buckets and lugged it home to watch the miracle happen over days and weeks.

The dot in the heart of each egg would swell and wriggle and hatch and all of a sudden what had been a string of pearls was a shoal of swimming commas, each a black blob with a tail, a tiny scrap of new-made life, of flesh, a thing unique unto itself and utterly unfroglike.

But then, by who knew what unfathomable process, the comma sprouted legs, fore legs, back legs, and its front end fattened and it tail shrank to nothing and then, more often that not, it died, because in becoming a frog its gills withered and it grew lungs so it needed to get out of the bucket and onto the land to breathe the air. But the deaths didn't matter. The world was impossibly rich with frogs and spawn, always infinitely more than we could ruin. There would always be frogs.

But that was then and this is now. Today, frogs are a blinking light on extinction's dashboard. That skin of theirs is a membrane. It makes them vulnerable to viruses, to pollution. Around the world they are becoming fewer, rarer. The nights are quieter. And all because of us.

So it's good to sit and hear them while we can, to hear them filling the night air with lust. Unseen I raised a glass of vodka to them last night then went inside because I was cold and left them to their trilling. Odd creatures; lovely creatures.