Pond Frogs Postpone Evening Chorus Citing Sore Throats

Millbrook Pond fell unusually quiet on Tuesday evening after its resident frogs announced that the nightly chorus, a fixture of the spring and summer calendar, has been postponed until further notice. A spokesfrog, speaking from a lily pad near the reeds and looking slightly under the weather, confirmed that several leading voices had woken up with a croak, and not the kind audiences enjoy.

“It has been a long season,” the spokesfrog said, pausing twice to clear its throat. “We have performed every evening since the first warm night of spring, rain or shine, and some of us have been doing the high parts. When the bass section starts sounding like a squeaky gate, you have to be responsible.” The remaining members of the chorus waited quietly at the water’s edge during the announcement, several of them wrapped, as far as anyone could tell, in pondweed.

The decision was not unanimous. One small tree frog, who has sung from the same reed every night for three summers, told reporters that nobody had consulted the tree frogs, that its throat felt perfectly fine, and that it had not spent all winter under a flowerpot in order to cancel things. It then declined to say whether it would sing anyway, in a manner that suggested it would.

Reaction around the pond has been mixed. The local dragonflies welcomed the calm. A family of ducks said they had not noticed anything, and asked whether the frogs had ever been particularly loud. A heron who has never once been invited to a performance was seen standing at the water’s edge for several hours, looking, in the words of one witness, extremely patient. The heron did not comment, and the frogs asked that it be moved further away from the press area.

Neighbours on the lane behind the pond admit that the silence is stranger than they expected. On a summer evening the chorus is the kind of sound nobody really listens to until it stops, like a fridge humming or rain on a roof. Several people reported lying awake on Tuesday, unsure what was wrong, before realising that the pond had simply gone quiet, and that they had grown used to being sung to sleep by an audience of frogs. One resident said she had tried humming to fill the gap, and had been asked by her family to stop.

Organisers expect the chorus to return as soon as throats have recovered and the evenings turn warm and damp again, which the spokesfrog described as the only proper singing weather. In the meantime, residents are advised to keep their windows open and listen carefully. Sources close to the reeds suggest that one small tree frog has refused to cancel anything at all, and is quietly rehearsing a solo.